UBTECH Partners with Tianyi to Scale Humanoid Robot Adoption

UBTECH and Tianyi Telecom Terminal signed a comprehensive strategic cooperation agreement on November 9, 2026, aiming to help the household-companion robot-terminal industry exceed one million units within three years. A separate three-year goal targets more than 100,000 ultra-bionic humanoid, wheeled humanoid and related terminals, the robotics company announced on its official WeChat account.

Tianyi is a wholly owned China Telecom Group subsidiary responsible for terminal operations and terminal-ecosystem cooperation. The partnership combines China Telecom’s channel network, customer base, and household and industry digital-ecosystem resources with UBTECH’s humanoid-robot technology and products. Both unit thresholds describe the industry scale the partners aim to help reach during those three years, rather than deliveries already achieved.

Telecom Channels and Commercial Pilots

Gui Xuan, Tianyi’s deputy general manager, described an implementation path intended to lower adoption barriers through new business models, encourage uptake through hands-on experience, and expand into industry-specific applications. The path connects the broad scale goals to specific customer-acquisition and deployment methods.

Planned commercial work includes coordinated procurement and marketing for robots, rental services, packages combining AI service benefits with terminals, and robot experience trials in telecom stores. The companies intend to refine products and services repeatedly for household companionship and commercial-service settings, drawing on Tianyi’s nationwide service channels and customer reach. Distribution and service packaging are therefore central to the rollout, with telecom stores and operator customer relationships serving as routes to robot adoption.

Joint Laboratory and Two-Way AI Integration

At the signing ceremony, the companies unveiled the Tianyi Telecom Terminal–UBTECH Robotics Joint Innovation Laboratory. Its four priorities are scenario discovery, product customization, application validation and standards development. The laboratory is intended to provide the technical foundation for scaled adoption and the packaging of capabilities into reusable components.

The technical plan calls for a bidirectional capability-packaging system for AI services. Robot speech interaction, visual recognition and emotional computing would be connected with telecom cloud-network infrastructure, AI foundation models, quantum technology, satellite services, security and eSIM, allowing capabilities to be packaged and invoked in both directions. Hao Baoyu, UBTECH’s senior vice president, said the company will increase product research and development for household companionship and commercial services, embed telecom AI, cloud-network and security capabilities into robot bodies, and jointly develop products around user requirements.

Production Readiness

UBTECH says its full-stack technology covers core components, complete-machine design and operating systems, with four core technology groups: an embodied-intelligence brain, a human-like cerebellum, high-performance robot bodies and swarm intelligence. Its products have been batch-tested in industrial, commercial and household settings.

UBTECH also reports that a 10,000-unit-scale smart factory entered operation in the second half of 2026 and that multiple product lines have entered mass production and delivery, providing the manufacturing base for scaled delivery and customized requirements across scenarios.

The agreement connects UBTECH’s stated production readiness to a defined route to customers through telecom-store trials, rentals, service bundles and joint product development. The open question is whether those mechanisms, together with the laboratory’s validation and standards work, can turn China Telecom’s reach into repeatable household and commercial deployments at the industry scale envisioned by the three-year goals.