The 2026 World Smart Industry Expo opened Thursday in east China's Tianjin, giving humanoid robots and AI their own pavilion for the first time at the expo.

The four-day event spans 130,000 square meters with more than 700 companies across six zones, including AI core technologies, intelligent connected vehicles, low-altitude economy and commercial aerospace.

Among the exhibitors in the embodied-AI pavilion are Unitree Robotics, showing its G1 humanoid priced under $100,000; UBTECH Robotics, demonstrating its Walker S industrial humanoid for factory tasks; and Galbot, with warehouse picking robots that navigate unstructured environments.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has designated humanoid robots a strategic priority.

The low-altitude economy zone includes EHang, which received the world's first autonomous air taxi type certificate from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) in 2023 and AutoFlight, which signed a deal with a Saudi logistics firm earlier this year to explore drone delivery.

More than 20 Chinese cities are building or planning vertiports. Shenzhen targets 1,000 low-altitude flight routes by 2027. By contrast, the US Federal Aviation Administration has approved only a handful of eVTOL test corridors, and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is still finalizing certification rules. Chinese eVTOL companies are flying commercial routes while Western rivals Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation remain in testing.

An international buyer delegation of foreign businesspeople is attending the event. Past editions drew buyers from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.