Robots in Public Restrooms and Garment Factories Land Major Orders
On September 23 at 11 a.m., at the AI exhibition area of the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo, a cleaning robot on the booth of Hangzhou Xingwuzhong Robotics was simulating public restroom work, drawing overseas buyers to stop and watch.
Yu Jiping, co-founder and COO of Xingwuzhong, said that as the expo just began this year, the company had already received more than 500 intent orders, mainly from overseas.
A reporter from Shanghai Securities News noticed at the event that the embodied AI industry is moving toward finer details and practical applications, with more robot companies entering niche segments.
Public restrooms: a 500-million-yuan order book
Yu Jiping, co-founder and COO of Xingwuzhong, has a particularly vivid sense of how demand converts into orders. This is Xingwuzhong's third consecutive year at the expo. In 2024, the company first brought its cleaning robots to the Digital Trade Expo; in 2025, it received more than 300 million yuan in intent orders. Today, its order book stands at 500 million yuan. In a seemingly niche scenario like public restrooms, robots are landing big orders.
Zhou Yong, co-founder of Xingwuzhong, said public restrooms are semi-structured environments, which makes them easier for robots to learn and adapt to. More than 100 Xingwuzhong robots already operate steadily in public restrooms across Hangzhou. As orders are gradually fulfilled, the company has entered a phase of mass production and capacity ramp-up this year.
Robots in garment sewing
Garment sewing, a traditional labor-intensive scenario, is also seeing robots enter the scene. At Aitu Technology's booth, a garment manufacturing robot separates a single layer of fabric from a stack of soft cloth, grabs and transfers it, then spreads and aligns the soft material to coordinate with automated sewing equipment in the next step.
Zhou Dongxu, chief technical engineer at Aitu Technology, said these seemingly simple actions involve three major challenges: separating a single piece of fabric from a stack; spreading that piece flat at a designated position with millimeter-level alignment; and achieving continuous spreading and alignment across multiple pieces of fabric.
Since the beginning of this year, Aitu Technology has signed a purchase order for 200 humanoid robots with Anhui Hengfeng. Its parent company, Jack Technology, has formed a strategic partnership with the Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, signing for 2,000 humanoid robots customized for garment scenarios.
Upstream suppliers see incremental demand
The accelerating deployment of robots has also kept upstream embodied AI suppliers busy, including those in data collection and core components. Hong Li, brand director of Jinglianwen Technology, said the company now has demand for about 200,000 hours of embodied AI material collection. To meet this demand, it is continuously expanding its data collection and supply system.
Unlike building a single environment in a lab, Jinglianwen is moving data collection into real consumer and industrial scenarios. The company has set up three self-built embodied AI data collection bases in Wuhu, Chongqing and Guiyang, where workers wear head-mounted and hand devices to record operations such as disassembly, assembly and packaging in real settings.
Beyond data, core components such as dexterous hands are entering a window for capacity expansion. At this expo, Xinuo Future showcased two dexterous hands, Flex 2 and Prima 1. Flex 2 uses a hybrid drive scheme combining tendon ropes and direct drive, targeting industrial and consumer applications; Prima 1 uses full-joint direct drive and can achieve an opening-and-closing time of 0.08 seconds.
Xinuo Future is expanding capacity in tandem. It has signed large orders with several leading embodied AI manufacturers, and a new 5,400-square-meter factory has been completed and put into production.