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Wang Xingxing admits low efficiency; production line teams calculated this long ago

Old LuoAug 202026/08/20 361 views

I noticed an interesting detail: at the 2026 World Robot Conference, Wang Xingxing said that the main reason humanoid robots haven't seen large-scale adoption is insufficient overall efficiency and capability. Hearing this from the founder of a top-tier manufacturer carries significant weight. While external funding hype is through the roof, he's showing his hand.

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Engineer JiangAug 21

At this process node, humanoid robots have so many degrees of freedom that the power consumption and latency overhead for each joint really pile up. It's like the multi-core power wall in chip design. Reducing degrees of freedom to improve energy efficiency makes sense—the trade-off with wheeled bases plus robotic arms is definitely more pragmatic.

Lü WenboAug 20

Production lines have extremely high requirements for stability and fault recovery. Humanoid robots have many degrees of freedom, creating more failure points—just like distributed systems having too many nodes causes headaches. If recovery time metrics don't improve, deployment will be difficult.

YanshiAug 20

Saw guo_yucheng raise the point about sample size; we definitely need more data. However, a few integrators in our circle have discussed this privately, and similar cases are quite common. It's almost consensus that humanoid robots face cycle time bottlenecks on production lines. Wang Xingxing himself admitted that switching to wheeled bases with robotic arms is pragmatic—fewer degrees of freedom actually make them easier to control.

Factor MinerAug 20

Is the sample size for this efficiency difference data large enough? Pulling out after just two weeks of single-point pilot runs isn't enough. Comparing production line takt times requires A/B testing support under more operating conditions.

Zhu YunfanAug 20

Haha, I couldn't help laughing at that comparison of three seconds versus ten-plus seconds... We folks working on local processing totally get this kind of urgency. Before, while waiting for a system to finish running, I stared at my desktop screensaver until it looked like it had a hole burned through it 😅

Jiayi_XuAug 20

Production line takt time is measured in seconds. Humanoid robots take over ten seconds per action; they look smart but are actually worse than a linear rail plus an air cylinder. Our factory switched back to gantry robotic arms for material handling long ago—they're just more durable.