The 11th Maker in China national SME Innovation and Entrepreneurship Contest for Intelligent Biomimetic Robots concluded in Shapingba District, Chongqing, with over 100 teams from across China showcasing embodied AI robotics projects from September 9 to 11, 2026.

The competition featured more than 100 teams across China competing in biomimetic robotics, industrial automation, and AI systems designed to perceive and interact with the physical world.

In Chongqing’s Shapingba District, the national robotics contest wrapped on September 11, 2026, highlighting efforts to move embodied AI toward commercial deployment.

Enterprise-category teams tested real-world systems in electric power, healthcare, and service sectors, emphasizing reliability and scalability for broader deployment.

Entries showcased deployment bottlenecks and practical embodied AI applications, including multi-robot coordination, warehouse task scheduling, assistive exoskeletons, biomimetic power infrastructure inspection robots, hummingbird-inspired drones, and autonomous clothing-folding robots.

The finals spanned 13 tracks from foundational research to near-commercial deployment, with startup and enterprise teams focusing on hardware, software, and control systems for next-generation robots.

Finals on September 11, 2026, featured tracks that covered systems from basic research to deployment-ready solutions and highlighted hardware, software, and control technologies.

The event facilitated technology transfer, financing, and local deployment discussions, with letters of intent signed between Shapingba authorities and companies like SIASUN, Chentu Technology, ZTE, and universities including Zhejiang University and Xi’an Jiaotong University.

Organizers hosted meetings among companies, universities, and research institutions to advance technology transfer and local deployment under a national program supporting innovative SMEs with specialized technologies under the theme 'Pushing Tech Frontiers, Unleashing Creativity.'

The competition underscores China’s push to move embodied AI from lab research toward real-world, scalable applications across industry and services, accelerating collaboration among industry, academia, and government.

Shapingba is positioning itself as a hub for embodied AI in Chongqing, backed by a 233% year-over-year rise in robotics output value in the first seven months of 2026, signaling rapid local growth.