Westlake Robotics releases WR1, a humanoid ‘general brain’
Demo shows two humanoids folding trousers with dexterous hands
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
On Oct 9, 2026 Westlake Robotics, a Hangzhou spin-out of Westlake University, published demos of WR1, a model that outputs one whole-body action sequence (walking, torso and dexterous hands) for humanoid robots.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 12 October 2026
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Key facts
- Design (company description via Pandaily): a ‘brain’ combining a world model and a vision-language-action model outputs a whole-body action sequence; a general action expert, GAE, trained in two stages on human motion data, tracks it and keeps balance
- Long tasks: short- and long-term motion memory; actions are generated in chunks, with the next chunk computed while the current one runs
- Demo: takes corn from a fridge, turns to an air fryer, squats to drag a basket and tidy toys, walks to a bedroom to straighten a quilt, without stopping between rooms
- Laundry: one humanoid lifts trousers from a swaying rack; two WR1 humanoids fold them together. An earlier arm-only setup reached 36 seconds per item at best (company figure)
- No benchmark results, paper or code were reported
- Founders: Donglin Wang and Yue Zhang, both tenured professors at Westlake University
What happened
Westlake Robotics showed WR1 controlling walking, posture and hands together, where most humanoids plan them separately and stand still before using their hands. The evidence is company demo video; there are no success rates.
Why it matters
Cloth folding with multi-fingered hands on a walking humanoid is a hard, widely used test of home-robot ability. Single source, company claims only.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 press
Press
Changes
- Filed (Pandaily)