(Yicai) Oct. 13 -- Robots at the 26th China International Industry Fair, which kicked off yesterday, are visibly more flexible than those that clumsily grabbed items at the year-earlier edition, with their intelligence continuing to improve.

Compared with collaborative robots that rely on programming, embodied intelligence with a brain and a hardware body has generalizable capabilities to learn, be trained, and evolve in real work scenarios, Chang Li, vice president of leading Chinese robot maker JAKA Robotics, told Yicai. "It can understand human instructions and quickly decompose tasks in the brain."

The trend of applying and popularizing embodied intelligence in many unstructured scenarios is inevitable, Chang noted during the debut of JAKA's wheeled humanoid robot at the fair, which autonomously moved boxes in a designated area of the exhibition hall.

JAKA is showcasing more than 30 robots at this year's CIIF, with about 60 percent being embodied intelligence products. More intelligent robots are entering diverse industrial application scenarios.

As more computing power and algorithm teams join the development, robots have gained stronger brains and become more flexible, a staff from Singapore starup RoboSpec said to Yicai. "Robots grab things as fast as humans do," the person noted, adding that one is making its global debut at the CIIF.

Traditional industrial robots suit standardized work scenarios, as they can deliver faster speeds and higher efficiency, but embodied intelligence is better for non-standard scenarios, Hua Zenan, a senior engineer at a foreign traditional industrial robot firm, told Yicai. As embodied intelligence tech advances, the two segments are gradually merging, and leading companies are expanding into humanoid robots, Hua pointed out.

AI-driven industrial automation is not about "reducing manpower" but about "reducing workload," Liu Wen, head of Schneider Electric's Industrial Automation Business' Digital Capability Center in China, said to Yicai. On the one hand, it frees people from repetitive labor and dangerous situations, allowing production personnel to shift to more valuable roles, and on the other, it helps reduce accidents and improve manufacturing stability and quality, Liu stressed.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev