Industry Forum | STEP 30th Anniversary: Going with the Flow in the Age of “AI + Robotics”
2025-08-12
From August 8 to 12, 2025, the World Robotics Conference (WRC), co-organized by the China Electronics Society and the World Robotics Cooperation Organization, will be held at the Yichuang International Convention & Exhibition Center in Beijing. This year’s conference is themed “Intelligent Robotics: Harnessing Embodied Intelligence,” and features four major sections: forums and conferences, exhibition displays, cutting-edge competitions, and supporting events. It has attracted participants from over 20 countries and regions worldwide, making it a key global platform for exchange in the robotics field.
This year’s “AI Large Model Empowering Robotics and Embodied Intelligence Industry: A New Paradigm Forum” (hereinafter referred to as the “Forum”) is themed “Building Foundations with Models, Embracing New Horizons in Embodied Intelligence.” The Forum brings together top scholars, industry leaders, and innovation pioneers, who will engage in in-depth discussions through keynote speeches, high-level dialogues, and showcases of cutting-edge innovations.
Liu Changwen, CEO of Shanghai New Motion Electric Co., Ltd., was invited to attend the conference forum and delivered a keynote speech titled “Going with the Flow in the Era of ‘Robotics Plus’.” Through a systematic analysis of the breakthrough opportunities in the robotics industry during the AI era, the key pathways for technology implementation, and New Motion’s practical experience, he shared with the world a new paradigm for robotics-plus ecosystems—“Made in China, Smart Manufacturing.”
The “Three-Stage Evolution” of Embodied Intelligence
Embodied intelligence—the new productivity engine in the AI era. It brings together the physical world (robots) and the virtual world (large models), following the same trajectory of “technological advancement → cost reduction → explosive growth in scale”—a pattern that mirrors the success stories of cars and mobile phones,” shared Mr. Liu.
In the short term, the fragmentation of application scenarios is giving rise to “a thousand robots, a thousand faces,” leading to a dazzling diversity in robotic forms under non-standard conditions. In the long term, since the world is ultimately created for humanity, humanoid robots represent the ultimate form within our sight. Standardization inevitably involves a certain degree of redundancy; thus, to make this redundancy more cost-effective, we need to scale up in volume.
Hardware costs can be reduced—what’s really holding us back is “brainpower.”
If we compare the entire industrial chain to a person: hardware is the “muscle.” In the future, hardware costs will continue to decline, and this “muscle” can even be trained to become lighter and stronger. The real “cerebellum,” meanwhile, is the control algorithm. As hardware costs keep falling, the relative importance of algorithms will only grow higher and higher. General Liu used the metaphors of “muscle” and “brain” to vividly break down the industrial chain.
End-to-end real-time control and the scarcity of authentic physical data represent two major challenges. STEP is one of the few companies that have successfully achieved iterative advancements in vertical-specific control and expanded their capabilities to cover a broader range of general-purpose applications. It’s also among the very few companies that have fully mastered and independently controlled both the underlying control systems and drive technologies. Leveraging its 30-year “control DNA,” STEP adopts a strategy of “deeply exploring vertical scenarios combined with modular scalability” to enter four key factory domains, including adaptive gripping and intelligent welding. Relying on its six “specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative” subsidiaries, STEP is now opening up its modular hardware and process software packages to ecosystem partners, working together to make “Robotics Plus” even deeper and more practical.
After thirty years of dedicated research in control technology, STEP is reshaping the evolutionary logic of robotics with its robust “Made in China” expertise. From the millimeter-level precision of adaptive gripping robots to the intelligent generation of welding paths, these technological breakthroughs deeply rooted in factory environments are quietly propelling the “Robotics Plus” concept from theory into industrial reality.
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