Commerce Ministry, National Development and Reform Commission and six other departments jointly issued the Action Plan for Promoting Smart Home Consumption, which lists household service robots and intelligent care products for the elderly as key promotion directions. Reporters visited Beijing Yizhuang, the country's first national-level robotics innovation cluster, along with industry leaders and communities, to see how robots are entering daily life and what still needs to be done to clear the last mile of robot-enabled smart elderly care.
Service robots are truly taking up posts
Clearing the last mile starts with letting robots enter real scenarios rather than sitting in display cases. At the smart health-care robot elderly station in Tianhuayuan Yili community, Ronghua Street, Beijing Yizhuang, the ground floor features a contactless senior dining table where a wave of the hand sends a tray along a conveyor belt. On the third floor culture and entertainment room, greeting, chess-playing, massage and intelligent health detection robots are lined up.
One of the problems elderly people face in daily life is boredom and loneliness, and robots provide a great deal of emotional value, station operations head Zhang Wendong told reporters. Currently, the utilization rate of various robots at the station exceeds 80 percent, receiving 20 to 30 elderly people daily. Wan Juqin, 84, loves interacting with the greeting robot Xiaorong: I call it to find the store manager, and it actually leads me there, and it even compliments my clothes, which is hilarious. Nearby at the AI health detector, 80-year-old Zhuang Lei has just finished a one-minute test and is checking 10 body indicators on the screen: It's pretty close to hospital blood test results. Zhang Wendong said the station has established an operational data feedback mechanism with multiple robot companies, where elderly usage habits and functional feedback are synchronized to the manufacturing side monthly to drive product iteration. Less than half a year since opening in March this year, the site has received nearly 10,000 visitors, with delegations from seven or eight countries coming for research, making it a showcase window for domestic health-care robots.
A 10-minute drive from the elderly station is the Beijing Zhaolin Songyuan Hotel. We have 17 different types of robots covering the front desk, guest rooms, kitchen and cleaning, said group director Wei Wei. The most core breakthrough is cross-building delivery. Unlike most hotel robots in the industry that can only operate in a single building, these devices can autonomously take elevators, pass through fire doors and gates, achieving free passage between three buildings. The hotel has also set up a secondary development team to customize robot sizes and pull-out trays based on restaurant table heights and aisle widths, precisely adapting to meal delivery and plate collection. The linen transport robot next to the laundry room can carry up to 150 jin at a time, completing the entire process automatically without manual intervention.
At the Robot Flame Institute 2.0 in the Beijing Robot Industrial Park, a giant purple LED screen wraps around the aroma of coffee. A robotic arm at the bar flexibly shakes coffee and makes latte art, while a cooking robot tosses a wok in the corner with even rhythm, and a simulated triceratops robot sways through the tables, drawing children from the next table to reach out and chase it. Last year the restaurant was like a showroom, but this year we are really putting robots to work, said restaurant head Shang Bowei. Many customers come specifically to check in, and the coffee made by robots can even print customer portraits, which is especially popular for posting on social media. At this stage, dining robots sell not just products but emotional value, and the operational data of each robot is transmitted back to the R&D side in real time, forming an industrial closed loop where consumption scenarios feed back into manufacturing upgrades.
Yizhuang's pilot is not an isolated case. At the Dawangjing Smart Health Care Experience Center in Cuigezhuang Township, Chaoyang District, smart elderly care products have begun extending to home scenarios. Lift-assist sofas, Parkinson's laser shoes, smart wheelchairs with obstacle detection, automatic nursing beds — behind each product is deep exploration and industrialization by local manufacturers of the needs of the elderly. These smart devices are responsible for feedback and recording usage problems, while people are responsible for judging problems and providing professional services. The core of smart health care is using technology to better deliver human services to the elderly, Cuigezhuang subdistrict office deputy director Guo Ruili told reporters.
Scale first breaks through the technology barrier
From the national industrial perspective, the growth momentum of the robotics industry is already considerable. Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology Ke Jixin revealed at the 2026 World Robot Conference that China's humanoid robot production in 2025 was about 20,000 units, exceeding 40,000 units in the first half of 2026, and is expected to exceed 100,000 units for the full year. Zhang Feng, Party Committee Secretary of the Chinese Institute of Electronics and Chairman of the China Humanoid Robot and Embodied Intelligence 100 Association, also said at the conference that humanoid robots are evolving from dancing on stage and running on tracks to being used at home and working in factories.
Taking Beijing Yizhuang, which reporters visited, as an example, by the first half of 2026 the area has gathered more than 300 robotics and embodied intelligence ecosystem enterprises, covering the three core components of reducers, controllers and servo motors, as well as the full chain of complete machine R&D, system integration and scenario application. The industrial scale has exceeded 20 billion yuan, forming an industrial pattern of R&D in Yizhuang, manufacturing in surrounding areas and application nationwide. During interviews, reporters found that in B-end markets with relatively high standardization such as elderly care institutions, business hotels and chain restaurants, the robotics industry has already formed replicable solutions and has the foundation for batch promotion. But to truly enter ordinary households and complete the last mile of livelihood implementation, multiple barriers still need to be broken.
Technology is the first bottleneck to break. Wei Wei told reporters that most livelihood robots still use scenario-based fixed programming mode, writing programs for specific environments, and changing to a different scenario requires re-debugging, making it difficult to adapt to vastly different home environments. To achieve large-scale household entry, the core is to break through general embodied intelligence model technology, enabling robots to have autonomous perception, autonomous decision-making and autonomous learning capabilities rather than relying on preset instructions.
As the industry collectively tackles technical bottlenecks, the Robot Kindergarten recently opened in Beijing Shougang Park provides a new technical path. This project, jointly built by a domestic technology company and the Openmind team of 2024 Turing Award winner and father of reinforcement learning Richard Sutton, abandons the traditional training mode of imitating human actions and lets robots learn autonomously through trial and error, perception, feedback and reflection like children. It is understood that in the park, robots equipped with tactile electronic skin can sense force and will say it hurts when their arm is held. In the learning area, robots autonomously explore the environment and accumulate experience in a safe environment. The company's head said in a media interview that the project aims to build a learning mechanism that can be transferred across different robot bodies.
Guo Ruili admitted that the biggest challenge currently lies in connecting the chain of reach, experience, evaluation, household entry and management, which is essentially building channels for the health-care manufacturing industry to extend from To B to To C. Once this is achieved, it will open up a broad household consumer market.
Policy package fits consumer pain points
Beyond the industry's own exploration, targeted policy efforts are clearing institutional obstacles for the last mile. The Action Plan for Promoting Smart Home Consumption issued by eight departments precisely targets the core bottlenecks of current industrial implementation, launching a policy package from multiple dimensions including supply, standards, consumption and finance. The plan effectively lowers the threshold for residents to upgrade smart homes through multiple measures such as subsidies, loan interest discounts, trade-ins and waste recycling.
Liu Chunsheng, associate professor at the School of International Trade and Economics at Central University of Finance and Economics, analyzed in an interview with reporters that this policy package precisely fits public consumption pain points. Localities can independently adapt subsidy standards to regional consumption differences, interest discount policies effectively ease one-time consumption pressure, and combined with old item recycling services, they dispel residents' concerns about upgrading. In the short term, it will effectively drive smart renovation of existing housing, and elderly-friendly products will be the first to open up the market.
Zhang Zhipeng, head of the artificial intelligence project at the Center for World Think Tank Studies at Shanghai International Studies University, said in an interview with reporters that relying on mandatory national standards for interconnection and IPv6 network upgrades can effectively break brand ecosystem islands, achieving coordinated operation of multi-device systems by unifying device interaction rules and connecting the home network terminal foundation. At the same time, improving the full lifecycle compatibility mechanism of devices can ensure stable operation in scenarios such as network disconnection, upgrades and replacements, enhancing the practicality and stability of whole-home intelligence from a technical level.
Regarding the elderly-friendly smart consumption focused on by policy priorities, both experts agreed in interviews that scenario-based implementation is the core key. Zhang Zhipeng said that popularizing elderly-friendly products requires adhering to the principle of devices adapting to the elderly, optimizing voice interaction functions in noisy environments and multi-dialect scenarios, ensuring safety protection functions are available offline, and building closed-loop operation and maintenance services relying on community service stations to solve maintenance difficulties for elderly users. Liu Chunsheng added that Beijing's government-enterprise collaborative implementation model is highly instructive, effectively solving the disconnect between products and the market through government platform building, scenario empowerment and enterprise iteration, forming a complete industrial development closed loop and providing a replicable mature path for the large-scale and popularized development of smart homes nationwide.
After a round of visits, reporters found that the last mile of livelihood implementation for the robotics industry is never simply selling products to consumers, but a deep integration of technology, industry, policy and real life needs. The value of manufacturing ultimately must land in people's lives. When robots are no longer eye-catching novelties on display stands but habitual helpers in daily life, truly integrated into people's livelihoods, the weight of China's new quality manufacturing truly lands on solid ground.