Inovance Technology, one of China's largest industrial automation suppliers, showed a humanoid robot for the first time at the 2026 China International Industry Fair in Shanghai. The InoBot W1 is a wheeled robot designed around the practical constraints of factory work, from heat and dust to narrow aisles and round-the-clock shifts.
The company describes the W1 as the first wheeled embodied robot to combine liquid cooling, modular design, a small chassis and long battery life. Its liquid-cooling loop is built around an NVIDIA Thor onboard computer, which Inovance says can run at full load for long periods in environments above 40 degrees Celsius while delivering 2,070 TOPS. Centralized cooling also lets the robot reach IP54 protection against dust, splashes and oil mist, and with fewer fans its operating noise stays under 60 decibels.
The chassis fits within 0.6 by 0.6 meters and uses omnidirectional steering wheels, so the robot can move through narrow spaces and turn on the spot. A 3.6-kilowatt-hour battery pack gives about 10 hours of operation, enough for a day or night shift, and two hot-swappable battery modules allow continuous 24/7 production.
The chest, arms, end effectors, folding mechanism and chassis are separate modules for production and maintenance, and the end of each arm can take a gripper, dexterous hand, pneumatic gripper or suction cup. The W1 uses Inovance's own seven-degree-of-freedom arms, with force sensors in every joint. The company says end force-control accuracy is within 3 newtons, enough for picking, plugging and fastening tasks, and the arms support real-time collision detection. An EtherCAT bus links the whole body with millisecond-level synchronization, and the torso, arms and chassis are planned as one motion model.
At the fair, the W1 worked with a vision system and an arc welding robot, loading and unloading workpieces. Inovance plans to offer an SDK covering sensors through whole-body control, a data collection and training platform, and technical cooperation on robot models with AI partners, two of which it already works with. It says it will build reference deployments in specific industries.
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