Foreword:

At AWE 2026, the humanization of home appliances and the integration of robots into daily life, two seemingly distinct paths, converged, setting a new course for the entire home appliance and consumer electronics sector.

Home Appliances [Mature], Robots [Entering Households]

Haier Smart Home unveiled a comprehensive home appliance system that personifies the entire household, powered by an upgraded Smart Home Brain. Leveraging multi-modal sensors, visual recognition, and on-device large models, it captures users' behavioral patterns, physical states, and emotional fluctuations, enabling proactive services across all scenarios.

Midea showcased its L4-level intelligent air conditioner, capable of millisecond-level human motion recognition, accurately discerning users' positions, postures, and activity levels to implement [wind follows person, wind avoids person] features.

Hisense's SLP Star Flash Human Sensing 2.0 technology, TCL's Xiaolanyi millimeter-wave radar technology, and Changhong's AI human-sensing air conditioner for dining and living areas all achieve high-sensitivity recognition of human positions and postures, allowing the airflow to actively adapt to people rather than the other way around.

Robam Appliances introduced the world's first AI cooking glasses, equipped with a self-developed cooking large model that accurately identifies ingredient types and senses heat levels.

Through AR prompts, these glasses guide users through cooking steps and can coordinate a full suite of AI digital kitchen appliances, directing range hoods, stoves, steam ovens, and more to work in harmony, covering the entire process from food preparation to serving.

Fotile showcased the world's first robot kitchen, featuring the industry's first [growth-oriented] kitchen embodied intelligence system.

Comprising a heterogeneous robot matrix, high-precision robotic arms handle tasks such as cup positioning, water filling, and tableware placement, while humanoid robots perform complex cooking operations like pouring oil, stir-frying, and serving dishes, achieving fully automated cooking.

According to the 2026 China Home Appliance Retail and Innovation White Paper released by AVC Neo during AWE 2026, the market size for humanized smart home appliances with multi-modal interaction and proactive service capabilities surged by over 35% year-on-year in 2025, more than tripling the growth rate of traditional smart home appliances.

Simultaneously, as home appliances become more humanized, robots are also making their way into households.

Ecovacs introduced its butler robot [Bajie], equipped with a self-developed OpenClaw robotic arm capable of autonomously performing precision household tasks such as picking up toys, organizing shoe cabinets, and placing clothes in the washing machine.

It also features continuous memory and user training capabilities, autonomously identifying and addressing various household issues, transcending the single-function limitation of cleaning.

Hisense's robot matrix, centered around the concept of a [home without chores], includes the Savvy butler robot, which combines a humanoid upper body with a wheeled chassis.

It can not only link and control all household appliances but also complete tasks like laundry and meal preparation through physical operations, as well as proactively sense and respond to home scenario needs.

Haier Smart Home released the [Haiwa] series of home service robots, covering three major scenarios: cleaning, companionship, and household tasks.

The cleaning robot can proactively identify ground dirt and complete cleaning, the companionship robot can remind elderly individuals to take medication, monitor fall risks, and provide timely warnings, while the household robot can coordinate with all smart home appliances to complete various tasks.

Yuandian Intelligence globally premiered its collaborative robot N1, weighing just 30kg and occupying less than 0.2 square meters. With its heterogeneous robotic arm structure, it can perform precision operations like twisting bottle caps, opening drawers, and picking up eggs, perfectly adapting to the confined spaces of family homes.

Yishi Zhihang released the world's first task-performing general-purpose embodied large model AWE3.0, with its A1 robot setting a Guinness World Record for the [most assemblies of sub-millimeter wire harnesses in one hour].

Roborock introduced the world's first dual-wheel-legged architecture robot vacuum cleaner G-Rover, with each wheel-leg capable of independent extension, lifting, and height adjustment, allowing it to cross thresholds, climb steps, and address blind spots in traditional cleaning.

MOVA introduced the [flying] robot vacuum cleaner Pilot 70, which expands the cleaning path from a flat surface to a three-dimensional space through a commercial-grade drone propulsion system, providing a new cleaning solution for duplexes and villas.

Dreame's laundry folding robot can identify, grasp, and fold clothes using dual robotic arms.

According to data from the 2026 China Service Robot Industry Development White Paper released by the Chinese Institute of Electronics, the market size for home service robots in China exceeded 58 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 21.3%, with non-cleaning home robots experiencing market growth of over 100%.

With the full market launch of mass-produced models priced under ten thousand yuan, the household penetration rate of home robots is set to achieve a significant breakthrough, with the market growth rate of general-purpose home robots capable of cross-scenario services expected to exceed 150%.

The boundaries between the two are rapidly blurring. In future homes, there will no longer be a clear distinction between [home appliances] and [robots], only home intelligence nodes with perception, decision-making, and collaboration capabilities.

AI Agent Capabilities: The Key to Manufacturers' Success

At this exhibition, nearly all leading brands are enhancing their AI Agent capabilities, marking the home appliance industry's complete transition from the basic intelligent stage of [voice commands, simple controls] to a high-level AI application stage of [proactive perception, autonomous decision-making, and full-scenario collaboration].

Haier Smart Home introduced the world's first set of L4-level intelligent home appliance suite, Seeker, which uses sensors and cameras distributed throughout the home to perceive changes in the home environment and users' behavioral patterns in real-time, anticipating user needs and achieving autonomous collaboration across all scenarios.

Midea unveiled its whole-house intelligence [Three Ones] strategy during the exhibition, namely one intelligent home network, one smart brain, and one open platform, aiming to create a complete intelligent operating system for the entire home.

Gree has built a whole-house interconnection system centered around air conditioners, empowering all household appliances through its AI2.0 dynamic energy-saving algorithm, enabling data interconnection, computing power sharing, and cloud-edge collaboration.

Manufacturers are shifting from selling individual products to creating whole-house, full-link intelligent solutions, with AI Agents serving as the core brain of these solutions.

From Stagnant Growth to a Second Growth Curve

For the industry, this new development route represents an inevitable choice for home appliance and robot companies to break through growth bottlenecks and escape stagnant competition.

According to AVC Neo data, the overall retail scale of China's home appliance market was 893.1 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year decline of 4.3%, with most traditional major home appliance categories experiencing declines in both sales volume and revenue.

For robot companies, the full-scenario expansion of integration into daily life has also allowed the industry to break free from the stagnant competition in robot vacuum cleaners.

Today, China has formed the world's most complete industrial chain for home appliances and robots, achieving full-chain autonomy and controllability from upstream chips, sensors, and large models to midstream product research, development, and manufacturing, and downstream channels, services, and ecosystems.

Domestic companies can now provide cost-effective edge computing chips that fully meet the on-device computing power needs of home appliances and robots.

Leading companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have all launched lightweight large models optimized for home scenarios, which can quickly adapt to different hardware products, significantly lowering the research and development threshold for companies.

The home appliance manufacturing supply chains in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta can quickly transform conceptual products into mass-produced products while achieving extreme cost control, enabling high-end products to quickly reach price points acceptable to ordinary consumers.

Traditional home appliance companies possess deep scenario understanding capabilities and a complete channel and supply chain system, robot companies have leading motion control and environmental perception technologies, and AI companies have core capabilities in large models.

The cross-border collaboration among the three has greatly accelerated the speed of technology implementation and significantly improved the maturity and practicality of products.

The core essence of home appliance humanization and robot integration into daily life is the [subjectivity shift] in home scenarios.

In this system, humans are the [operators] of the entire home intelligence system, with all devices being passively responsive tools.

This has been the core reason why smart homes have failed to become widespread for many years—they have not reduced users' operational costs but instead increased their learning costs and operational burdens.

The implementation of home appliance humanization and robot integration into daily life has changed this logic, with this shift in subjectivity enabling truly [seamless interaction] in home intelligence.

Conclusion:

Future homes will not feature a pile of isolated hardware or a single, all-powerful super robot but rather a complete, distributed, and user-friendly home intelligence system.

The Chinese home appliance and consumer electronics industry has emerged from the stagnant competition of parameter obsession and price wars, entering a new era of value competition.

Partial References: AVC Neo's Checking In at AWE 2026 | Major Home Appliances: From [Functional Machines] to [Life Companions] - The Awakening of Intelligence, Xinmou's After Touring AWE 2026, I Found That Consumer Electronics Have Finally Found a New Way to Live, Leikeji's AWE 26 Ultimate Preview: Not Just Home Appliances, Tech Giants Are Competing in [Agent] Capabilities, and China Robot Network's At AWE 2026, We Saw These Embodied Intelligent Robots