Embodied Intelligence Enters Factories and Warehouses: What Else Must Robots Compete on After Smarter Brains?

At the CeMAT exhibition in Shanghai on November 3, robotics companies showcased technical improvements in warehouse automation, including climbing robots with four-directional retrieval, narrow-aisle obstacle avoidance, and multi-machine collaboration. Companies like Cainiao, Figure, Xingdong Jiyuan, and Xiangong Intelligent demonstrated deployments in logistics centers, highlighting efficiency gains such as a 15% increase in robot operation speed and 20% higher storage density for upgraded climbing robots. However, challenges remain in handling non-standard scenarios, balancing hardware costs with model inference requirements, and achieving commercial viability where investment payback periods range from one to 1.5 years.