- Fair’s new interactive experience zone showcases humanoid and quadruped robots across retail, agriculture, elderly care and cultural heritage as China’s service trade surpasses one trillion dollars
BEIJING 12 SEPTEMBER 2026 (Agencies) – The 2026 China International Fair for Trade in Services is being held at Shougang Park in Beijing from September 9 to 13, with robots emerging as the star attraction across many exhibition halls, offering a full display of China’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
This year’s fair introduced a new interactive experience zone for robot consumer scenarios, featuring six immersive sections covering retail, automobiles, clothing customisation, music and performance, quadruped bionics, and sports competition. Set against Shougang Park’s industrial backdrop and paired with numerous interactive humanoid robots, the zone offers visitors a close-up look at how embodied intelligence is reshaping daily life, Xinhua News Agency reported on Tuesday.
Hall 3 at Shougang Park, dedicated to telecommunications, computer and information services, emerged as one of the most technology-heavy venues, showcasing a wide range of AI and robotics applications for future life and services. A wheeled dual-arm robot designed for both unmanned post offices and cultural creative retail made its debut, automatically picking up a written postcard, stamping it with precision and dropping it into a nearby mailbox before handling a blind box purchase with equal ease. An on-site staff member said the robot is already deployed in China Post scenarios, handling both retail and postal services at once.
Robots are also opening new possibilities in agriculture and elderly care. Inspirai Robotics said its products have already been tested in fruit picking, tea picking and tea processing, with elderly care marked as a key focus area, where robots can handle many caregiving tasks for seniors and those with limited mobility, easing the load on human caregivers. A first-time exhibitor demonstrated a different angle on human-robot interaction through data collection, showcasing the NOLO Ego, a head-mounted system that captures 360-degree real-world operation data that can then be used to train robots, for instance helping them judge turns during a marathon, providing more realistic learning material for embodied intelligence.
He Qionghua, head of Hall 3, said the venue features more than 30 products making their debut or first showcase, including high-jump robots, cooking robots, wall-climbing robots, and a holographic communication pod that projects three-dimensional images once a person steps inside, offering a glimpse of an intelligent economy where carbon-based and silicon-based life coexist.
In Hall 6, a three-metre circular rotating stage sits at the centre, where multiple competing humanoid robots take turns demonstrating stable walking gaits and dynamic performances, with the floor covered in half-marathon-themed virtual track decals and a ring-shaped flexible LED screen playing highlight clips of race sprints to recreate the atmosphere of a humanoid robot half-marathon, according to the Beijing E-Town WeChat account on Tuesday. Beyond the robot competitions, the zone also features an interactive area where both adults and children can operate robots through a mini obstacle course, experiencing the fun of robotics firsthand.
At the fair’s Beijing cultural heritage exhibition area, the historic scene of Liulichang Street antique trading has been recreated, with two robots playing the roles of shopkeeper and attendant, introducing cultural relics and artworks to visitors and exhibitors, chinanews.com reported on Wednesday. Bi Jianyu, an official from the Beijing Municipal Cultural Heritage Bureau, said the robots can introduce more than 100 cultural relics and artworks in detail and tell the history of Liulichang, adding that human sales staff have limitations in explaining the value behind such items, while robots, through training and learning, can tell the stories behind the artefacts to visitors.
Fair participants noted that with the deep integration of digitalisation, intelligence and green development, services are becoming increasingly tradable and the boundaries of trade are expanding. China’s service trade has now exceeded one trillion dollars, becoming a key driver of trade growth and structural upgrading, Guangming Daily reported on Thursday.