Viewing New Highlights of the Intelligent Economy from the Zhongguancun Forum Annual Conference

In March, Beijing is full of spring vitality, and the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum annual meeting has opened as scheduled. Making coffee, sorting express deliveries, playing the piano, and drumming… At the event site, various robots showcased their unique skills, vividly demonstrating the new atmosphere of artificial intelligence accelerating into reality.

“Customer number 23, please pick up your meal.” Following the voice, the humanoid robot “Mozi” from Qianxun Intelligent (Hangzhou) Technology Co., Ltd. skillfully threaded a sugar-coated hawthorn through a bamboo skewer. The food delivery robot “Kuafu” from Lejutong Research (Beijing) Robot Technology Co., Ltd. smoothly delivered the meal to the customer, and after completing the delivery, “Kuafu” made a heart gesture toward the onlookers, earning rounds of praise.

Unlike previous single-machine displays and showcase performances, this year’s robot dining bar featured several heterogeneous robots working under unified coordination, each showcasing their strengths: the welcoming robot warmly greeted and guided orders, the preparation robot waved its “arms” to make candied hawthorn and sugar-fired pastries, and the delivery robot shuttled back and forth, delivering accurately — taking less than two minutes from ordering to meal delivery, all without human intervention. The clearly defined division of labor and precise movements of the robots made one feel as if they were in a future restaurant.

Guests visit the robot dining bar. Photo by Ju Huanzong, Xinhua News Agency.

“How to allocate multiple robots during concurrent orders and how to assign tasks to delivery robots are all concentrated reflections of the robot brain’s scheduling capability,” said Wang Qiang, Director of Embodied Operation Algorithms at Leju Robot. The dining bar has been well-received since its debut. “Yesterday, we operated for about 5 hours, receiving over 130 orders,” Wang said. In the near future, the company will find more application scenarios suitable for embodied intelligence, allowing technology to truly serve people’s lives.

In addition to the service industry, several types of humanoid robots from Leju have already been applied in industrial scenarios. It is reported that by 2025, the company will deliver thousands of full-size “Kuafu” humanoid robots. Currently, industry enthusiasm is rapidly rising, and breakthroughs in technology and market growth are entering an explosive period.

Xu Guoqing, a staff member at Lingxin Qiaoshou (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., also sensed the market changes: “The sales of Lingqiao hands have increased nearly tenfold in the past year, and we now hold over 80% of the market share in the high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hand market.” At the Zhongguancun Forum annual meeting, the mechanical hand brought by Lingxin Qiaoshou was flexible and exquisite, plucking strings to play music and threading needles, attracting a lot of attention.

The needle-threading robot perceives the position of the needle and thread through visual and tactile sensors and aligns them, with its “hands” steadily passing a millimeter-thick fine line through the needle’s eye. “Our dexterous hands are priced at one-tenth or even one-thirtieth of similar products abroad, and in the future, costs will be lower, allowing them to enter more people’s daily lives,” Xu Guoqing said.

At the permanent exhibition at the Zhongguancun Exhibition Center, a robot equipped with a dexterous hand demonstrated needle threading. Photo by Ju Huanzong, Xinhua News Agency.

In the field of brain-machine interfaces, the implementation of technology is also accelerating. The brain-machine interface “Beinao No. 1,” which attracted much attention at last year’s Zhongguancun Forum, has once again become a focal point this year. Yuan Yaning, a staff member at the Beijing Institute of Brain Science and Brain-like Research, introduced that “Beinao No. 1” adopts a semi-invasive wireless brain-machine interface technology route, and since the beginning of 2025, it has completed 7 cases of human implantation.

“This year, ‘Beinao No. 1’ will officially launch a comprehensive registration of clinical GCP trials, mainly targeting patients with cervical spinal cord injuries, with an estimated enrollment of 50 to 100 patients throughout the year,” Yuan Yaning said. The fully invasive technology route of the “Beinao No. 2” brain-machine system is expected to begin clinical validation this year.

The rapid advancement of cutting-edge technology relies heavily on strong support from the industry. A relevant person in charge at Beijing Zhongguancun Capital Fund Management Co., Ltd. introduced that the company has established a special fund of 400 million yuan for Beinao, supporting the R&D and industrialization of “Beinao No. 1” through a targeted fund model. “We are not just investing money; we are also building bridges.” Relying on the innovative fertile land of Zhongguancun, they are working to connect the entire process from laboratory to clinical, from research and development to market for brain-machine interface technology, accelerating its implementation, and making this once unattainable cutting-edge technology truly benefit patients.

As robots learn to collaborate at “work,” as mechanical hands can thread needles and pluck strings into melodies, and as brain-machine interfaces gradually transition from science fiction to reality — each pulse of technological innovation is quietly changing our lives, while also more clearly outlining a new industrial landscape where artificial intelligence transitions from “showing off” to “landing,” from “single-point” to “collaboration.”