EX Robots Carves Niche in Tourism with Super-Realistic Humanoids
In September 2026, Xinhua News visited the Dalian Jinshitan National Tourist Resort, where a tech company named EX Robots came into public view. Rather than pursuing industrial scenarios such as factory handling or automobile manufacturing, EX Robots has deployed its hyper-realistic humanoid robots in science museums, commercial districts, and educational classrooms. The robots enable figures like Einstein to teach physics, Su Shi to recite poetry, and a robot named 'Xiao Qi' to serve as a docent, attempting to forge a non-industrial path between humans and machines through highly lifelike faces and emotions.
EX Robots' technical trajectory is distinctive. Founded in 2013, the company initially specialized in exporting silicone dolls, pivoting to biomimetic robots around 2020. The business logic is clear: silicone skin, facial shaping, and skeleton-driven underlying technologies overlap heavily. Today, EX Robots holds over 160 core intellectual property rights and has broken through several bottleneck technologies, including flexible joints, robot operating systems, intelligent expressions, and biomimetic dexterous hands. Its robots feature digital modeling and 3D-printed faces, with elastic skin texture and vascular patterns, integrating 25 sets of control units in the head and exceeding 140 degrees of freedom across the body, capable of mimicking human micro-expressions such as happiness, anger, sadness, and joy. The company's annual production capacity exceeds 500 units and has replicated its 'Future Science Museum' model in cities like Shenyang and Kunming.
Market feedback has validated the commercial viability of this path. In the consumer market, hyper-realistic robots have shown explosive potential: UBTech's U1 super-realistic robot received nearly 4,000 orders within just 10 days of pre-sale, with deposits alone exceeding 10 million yuan. According to TrendForce, the global companion humanoid robot market is projected to reach $1.1 billion by 2030. In B2B scenarios, EX Robots' science museums each require dozens to hundreds of robots. The company has built China's first robot restaurant, robot bar, and robot theater, using biomimetic humanoids to recreate historical figures and leverage NPC large models to enable 'time-travel' dialogues, transforming technology into replicable cultural tourism products.
However, being 'more human' is itself a controversial area. On one hand, the emotional interaction track more easily forms a commercial closed loop. Digital economy scholar Liu Xingliang points out that industrial robots emphasize input-output ratios, while companion robots sell emotional value; consumers are willing to pay for experiences, and future models may include hardware plus AI memberships, health management, and other recurring revenue streams. On the other hand, large-scale deployment of hyper-realistic robots still faces high costs, insufficient empathy, data security, and other bottlenecks. More critically, ethical challenges emerge—when robots possess near-human faces and micro-expressions, deepfakes, portrait infringement, and blurring of human-machine boundaries come to the fore.