Inside the busy aisles and booths of the Fair Plus robotics trade show in Shenzhen this week, the usual stunt spectacle was replaced by practical tasks: robots sorting supermarket stock, serving popcorn and transporting oversized boxes.

Among them, Shenzhen-based X Square Robot showed the real-world ability of its wheel-based humanoids, using the firm’s self-developed Wall-A embodied foundation model to pick up rubbish from the floor and place it in a bin.

Currently deployed in on-demand cleaning services in homes in Shenzhen, the Quanta X1 Pro robot on display handles chores like folding laundry and scooping cat litter.

By leveraging a sophisticated supply chain and a wide range of real-world applications, local firms such as X Square have helped Shenzhen become the country’s leading robotics powerhouse.

The total output of Shenzhen’s robotics industry reached a record in 2025, rising 20 per cent from a year earlier to over 242 billion yuan (US$35.4 billion), according to a whitepaper released at Fair Plus – short for Fair of AI and Robotics Plus – which ran from Wednesday to Friday.

Shenzhen accounted for 43 per cent of China’s total output of service robots, producing nearly 8 million units last year, while the city manufactured 194,900 industrial robots, accounting for a quarter of the national output, according to the whitepaper. That put Shenzhen at the top nationally for both core robotics categories, the paper added.