Preface:

The humanization of home appliances and the integration of robots into home life, two seemingly distinct yet parallel paths, converged at AWE 2026, illuminating a new trajectory for the entire home appliance and consumer electronics sector.

Home Appliances Embrace Human-like Qualities, Robots Become Part of the Family

Haier Smart Home unveiled a comprehensive, humanized home appliance system, enhanced with an upgraded Smart Home Brain. Leveraging multimodal sensors, visual recognition, and on-device large models, it comprehensively 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 people, wind avoids people" functionality.

Hisense's SLP StarFlash 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 highly sensitive recognition of human positions and postures, allowing the airflow to actively adapt to people rather than vice versa.

Robam Appliances launched the world's first AI cooking glasses, equipped with a self-developed cooking large model, capable of accurately identifying ingredient types and sensing heat levels. Through AR prompts, it guides users through cooking steps and can coordinate with 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 presented 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 like locating cups, filling water, and placing tableware, while humanoid robots execute complex cooking operations such as pouring oil, stir-frying, and serving dishes, achieving fully automated cooking.

According to the 2026 China Home Appliance Retailing and Innovation White Paper released by AVC Cloud during AWE 2026, the market size of humanized smart home appliances with multimodal 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.

In tandem with the humanization of home appliances, the integration of robots into home life is also well underway.

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 handling various household issues, transcending the limitations of mere cleaning.

Hisense's robot matrix, centered around the concept of a "chore-free household," includes the Savvy butler robot, which boasts a humanoid upper body combined with a wheeled chassis. It can not only linkage control and manage whole-house appliances but also complete household tasks such as laundry and meal preparation through physical operations, as well as proactively perceive and respond to household needs.

Haier Smart Home released the "Haiwa" series of household 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 people to take medication, monitor fall risks, and provide timely warnings, while the household robot can coordinate with whole-house smart appliances to complete various household tasks.

Yuandian Intelligence globally premiered its collaborative robot N1, weighing only 30kg and occupying less than 0.2 square meters. With its heterogeneous robotic arm structure, it can perform precision operations such as twisting bottle caps, opening drawers, and picking up eggs, perfectly adapting to the use needs of narrow household spaces.

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

Roborock introduced the world's first dual-wheel-legged architecture robotic 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 brought the "flying" robotic 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 duplex homes and villas.

Dreame's clothes-folding robot can identify, grasp, and fold clothes through 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 of household service robots in China exceeded 58 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 21.3%, with non-cleaning household robots experiencing market growth of over 100%.

With the full launch of mass-produced models priced under 10,000 yuan, the household penetration rate of household robots is set to achieve a significant breakthrough, with the market growth rate of general-purpose household robots capable of cross-scenario services expected to exceed 150%.

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

AI Agent Capabilities: The Key to Manufacturers' Success

At this exhibition, almost all leading brands are ramping up their AI Agent capabilities, with the home appliance industry completely bidding farewell to the basic intelligence stage of "voice commands, simple control" and entering the high-level AI application stage of "proactive perception, autonomous decision-making, and whole-scenario collaboration."

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

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

Gree, with air conditioners as the hub, has built a whole-house interconnection system, 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 Inventory Competition to a Second Growth Curve

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

According to AVC Cloud data, the overall retail scale of the Chinese 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 home life has also allowed the industry to break free from the inventory competition trap of robotic vacuum cleaners.

Today, China has formed the world's most complete home appliance and robot industrial chain, from upstream chips, sensors, and large models to midstream whole-machine R&D and manufacturing, and then to downstream channels, services, and ecosystems, achieving full-chain autonomy and controllability.

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 household scenarios, which can quickly adapt to different hardware products, significantly lowering the R&D 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, allowing high-end products to quickly reach price ranges acceptable to ordinary consumers.

Traditional home appliance companies possess deep scenario understanding capabilities and well-established channel and supply chain systems, while robot companies have leading motion control and environmental perception technologies, and AI companies possess 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 the humanization of home appliances and the integration of robots into home life is the "subjectivity shift" in household scenarios.

In this system, humans are the "operators" of the entire household intelligent system, with all devices being passively responsive tools. This is also the core reason why smart homes have failed to become widespread over the past many years—they have not reduced users' operational costs but instead increased their learning costs and operational burdens.

The implementation of the humanization of home appliances and the integration of robots into home life has changed this logic, with this shift in subjectivity enabling true "effortless interaction" in household intelligence.

Conclusion:

In the future, households will not have a pile of isolated hardware, nor will they have an all-powerful super robot, but rather a complete, distributed, and warm household intelligent system.

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

Partial References: AVC Cloud'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 AWE26 Ultimate Preview: Not Just Home Appliances, Tech Giants Are Competing in "Agent" Capabilities, and China Robot Network's At AWE2026, We Saw These Embodied Intelligent Robots