Last year – at the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, the robots drew applause for performing a traditional Yangko folk dance. A year later, those same robots returned to China’s biggest annual broadcast — and the difference was stark. At the recently held 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, watched by around 679 million viewers, Unitree’s G1 and H1 robots performed an entirely autonomous kung fu routine involving swords, nunchaku, table vaults, 3-metre aerial flips, a 7.5-rotation Airflare spin, and high-speed cluster repositioning at up to 4 metres per second. The taller H2 humanoid appeared separately, dressed as the Monkey King, riding quadruped robot dogs at a sub-venue in Yiwu.
The company stated that the martial arts sequence was carried out without any backend human control — a genuine first for a fully autonomous humanoid cluster performance of this scale and complexity on a live broadcast stage. The technical backbone included reinforcement learning, force-position hybrid control, a high-concurrency cluster control system, and a self-developed AI fusion localization algorithm combining proprioceptive sensors with 3D LiDAR data to keep dozens of robots precisely synchronised during dynamic, fast-moving routines.
Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing described the innovations as highly practical — the kind of advances in multi-robot coordination and high-dynamic motion control that will directly support large-scale deployment in real-world industrial and logistics environments in the future..even the robot fall seen during the performance was intentional and scripted as part of the choreography.
The business momentum behind this showcase is equally notable. Unitree shipped around 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025 — more than the combined output of US competitors including Tesla, Figure AI, and Agility Robotics, according to market research firm Omdia. For 2026, the company is targeting shipments of between 10,000 and 20,000 units. Morgan Stanley has already doubled its 2026 China humanoid sales forecast to 28,000 units in response to the sector’s rapid growth.
Three other Chinese robotics companies — Galbot, Noetix, and MagicLab — also featured at the gala, reflecting how China is using its most-watched cultural broadcast as a deliberate platform to showcase the maturity of its humanoid robotics industry.
