The 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference and the High-Level Meeting on Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence (WAIC) opened today simultaneously in four venues across three locations: Shanghai World Expo, Zhangjiang, and the West Bund.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Intelligent Partners, Creating the Future Together.” The total exhibition area exceeded 100,000 square meters for the first time, with over 1,100 companies participating and more than 300 products making their global debut. On the morning of the conference, “Xiao Liu,” a new generation demonstrative robot developed by Tencent Robotics X Lab, made its first public appearance.
“Xiao Liu” is an iterative upgrade of “Xiao Wu,” the fifth-generation robot released by Tencent Robotics X Lab in September 2024. “Xiao Wu” is positioned as a human-living environment robot, adopting a four-legged wheel-foot hybrid design, combining the obstacle-crossing ability of legged robots with the operational efficiency of wheeled robots, and equipped with a large area of tactile skin, multi-finger dexterous hand, and a number of self-developed technologies such as safe human-computer physical interaction.
Tencent Robotics X Lab previously demonstrated “Xiao Wu” completing tasks such as picking up packages for the elderly and helping them get out of bed in a nursing home experimental scenario. As “Xiao Wu’s” successor, “Xiao Liu” continues the design direction of safe interaction with people and anthropomorphic movements, and adopts key rope transmission technology.
Note from Tech free press: Tencent Robotics X Lab was established in 2018 and belongs to Tencent Technology Engineering Group (TEG). Along with Tencent AI Lab, it serves as one of the company’s two fundamental support departments for its AI industry. Zhang Zhengyou serves as the director and chief scientist of the lab.
Previously, the laboratory had launched the quadruped robot Max, the wheeled robot Ollie, the human habitat robot “Xiao Wu”, as well as the three-finger/five-finger dexterous hand TRX-Hand and the robotic arm TRX-Arm.
During this year’s WAIC, Tencent Robotics X Lab also collaborated with Yuejiang Technology to train and deploy Tencent VLA models on real production line workstations of leading global cosmetic manufacturers, using the Yuejiang X-Trainer platform as an industrial-grade real-device benchmark platform, with a success rate of over 95%.
The 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference will continue until July 20th. Tencent has not yet disclosed further details regarding the specific technical parameters, functional demonstrations, and subsequent commercialization plans for “Xiao Liu
