WRC 2026 Core Components: 137 Robot Parts Suppliers

1. Executive summary

• Actuation is the layer. 75 of the 137 companies carry Motion & Actuation and 48 Perception & Vision. End-effector & Grasping has 24, compute 12, power 5, connectivity 5.

• Most of the load-bearing figures needed a caveat attached. Eighteen figures headed for this report were handed to separate researchers asked to challenge them. Five stood as filed. Nine needed the caveat rewritten, usually because planned capacity had been read as installed capacity. Four could not be confirmed at all. These eighteen were chosen because they carried the most weight, not sampled at random, so this is not a pass rate for the layer.

• Audited volume exists, in a few places. Kinco sold 83,000 frameless torque motors in 2025 and robotics passed half of revenue. Inspire delivered over 10,000 five-finger hands against a China-wide market GGII sizes at about 19,200. Hesai shipped 260,653 robotics lidars in the first half of 2026.

• Prices are now public, at the bottom of each range. A harmonic joint at RMB 699, a six-axis tactile sensor at RMB 3,671, a six-degree-of-freedom hand at RMB 3,999 after subsidy. None of the three was new at this show; all were listed months earlier.

• Robot makers are buying into their suppliers. AgiBot and LinkerBot both appear on Motorevo’s cap table. Shanghai Electric took a stake in DexRobot and set up two joint ventures with it, one of them for component production. Vertical integration in this layer is equity, not in-house engineering.

2. Scope

Report 1 classified 248 of the 316 WRC 2026 exhibitors against the RobotToday taxonomy. This report covers the 137 that carry at least one core-component category. 33 of them also build finished robots and appeared in Report 2; 31 appear in Report 4, which covers software, compute and interaction. Companies are not assigned to a single report, so the same firm can be read in more than one.

Launches and company news come from a research pass covering 1 July to 26 August 2026. Eighteen figures were then re-checked by separate researchers who were asked to challenge them and barred from using the original sources. Section 5 sets out what was checked and how. Where a number is a company’s own statement with no third party behind it, this report says so or leaves it out. Differences between an announced figure and a filed one are common at this stage of an industry; they are reported here so that like can be compared with like, not as a judgement on any company.

3. What the 137 companies build

The layer leans hard on mechanics. Motion & Actuation covers 73 companies: joints, frameless torque motors, harmonic and planetary reducers, roller screws and drives. Perception & Vision covers 48 and End-effector & Grasping 24. With navigation, those four account for 157 of the 179 company-category entries in the layer.

Figure 1. Categories among the 137 core-component companies. Multi-valued, so the bars sum to more than 137.

The electronic end is close to empty. Twelve companies carry Compute & Chips, five Power & Energy and five Connectivity, against the 89 humanoid and legged platform builders counted in Report 2. The chip vendors that did come — AMD, Infineon, Rockchip, Realtek — brought general-purpose platforms or automotive parts repositioned for robotics rather than parts designed and volume-produced for it.

Figure 2. What else the 137 component companies do. A company can appear in more than one report in this series.

Forty-four of the 137 carry a category outside this layer: 33 also build finished robots and 21 also carry software. Pure-play part makers are a clear majority here.

4. What was launched

The official count for the show was 311 debut products across all exhibitors. Inside the component layer, two shifts were visible on the stands.

4.1  Joints stopped being parts and became modules

Leaderdrive, until now a harmonic-reducer supplier, showed the KGU integrated joint module — reducer, torque motor, drive, twin encoders and brake in one housing, with EtherCAT and CANopen built in — alongside a linear actuator combining a planetary roller screw, torque motor, drive and sensor. RobStride showed its 00–06 integrated joint line: the 05 weighs 190 g with a 5.5 N·m peak, the 06 weighs 621 g and takes 11 N·m rated and 36 N·m maximum. Motorevo, which raised in July, sells modules from 2 to 400 N·m across planetary, harmonic and cycloidal designs.

The commercial consequence shows up in the price list. Juxie’s R48 Lite — 48 mm across, 260 g, 101:1, 5 N·m rated and 11 N·m peak — is listed at RMB 699. That is a harmonic joint at a consumer price point. Two qualifiers travel with it: RMB 699 covers the lightest model in the family, and the price was published in April 2026, four months before this show. The larger models carry no public price at all.

4.2  Hands: more degrees of freedom, and a price

Dexterous hands were the busiest sub-segment. DH Robotics showed a three-finger hand with 7 active degrees of freedom, 50 N per finger and 15 kg lifting capacity. BrainCo’s Revo 2 weighs 383 g, grips 5 kg and carries 20 kg. Changingtek launched a tendon-driven 11-degree-of-freedom hand that reconfigures between left and right. LinkerBot lists its six-degree-of-freedom O6 Lite at RMB 3,999 after subsidy, and says it now mass-produces direct-drive, linkage and tendon transmissions in parallel.

Most of these had been shown before — at WAIC 2026 six weeks earlier, or at the companies’ own launch events. "Debut" at this show usually means debut on this floor. When a report says a product was launched at WRC, the date on the first press release is worth checking.

4.3  Sensing and compute

On the sensing side the movement is in touch. PaXini sells a six-axis tactile sensor at RMB 3,671 through its own store, one of very few published prices anywhere in robot sensing; the GEN4 line it showed here has no public price or specification. Tashan launched TS-FT, which adds temperature to force, proximity and position in a single part. Blue Dot Touch and Kunwei both showed six-axis force sensors. On compute, Huixi’s R1 domain controller claims more than 500 TOPS and volume shipment, but R1 was launched in 2024 as an automotive driving chip, the TOPS figure carries no stated precision, and the production claim traces to a single local-government release.

5. How the figures were verified

Component suppliers publish a lot of figures and relatively few of them can be traced to a primary source, which is normal for a business-to-business layer in an industry this young. Eighteen figures that would otherwise have gone into this report were handed to separate researchers with instructions to test them, using sources the original researchers had not touched. Five held as filed. Nine appear here with the caveat corrected. Four could not be confirmed and are marked as such. The eighteen were selected for the weight they carried in the argument, not sampled, so the table below is a record of what was checked rather than a measure of the layer.

Table 2. Eighteen figures re-checked against independent sources. "Restated" means the figure holds once its basis is stated precisely; "not confirmed" means no independent source could be found, not that the figure is wrong.

Three differences recur between what is announced and what is on record: planned capacity read as running capacity, a company’s own market-share estimate read as a market study, and a product shown at an earlier event described as a debut. None of the three is unusual in a fast-moving sector, and in the coverage read for this report they were generally carried forward unchanged. They are set out here so readers can spot them, not as a criticism of any company.

6. Capital

Money moved upstream during this window, and it moved quickly.

Figure 3. Capital and shipment events in the component layer, June to August 2026.

Laifual listed in Hong Kong on 30 June as an unprofitable-technology issuer, closing its first day above HK$9bn. On the private side, six component rounds closed inside six weeks: Motorevo, Xinqi, Lingcha Yunkong, Xense, DexRobot and Xingfan. The notable part is not the count but the register. AgiBot appears on two of these cap tables; Shanghai Electric took a stake in DexRobot and formed two joint ventures with it, one of which is for component production and supply. In these two cases at least, the robot maker secured supply by buying into it rather than building it.

7. How to read this

Three things the data supports.

• The mechanical layer is here; the electronic one is not. 75 actuation suppliers against 12 in compute and 5 in power. Either the parts that decide how long a humanoid runs and how fast it thinks come from suppliers who do not exhibit at robotics shows, or the platform builders design them in house. This sample cannot tell the two apart.

• Audited volume is rare, and concentrated. Of the shipment figures this report was able to check, only those from Kinco, Inspire, Hesai and Motorevo could be independently confirmed. That says what has been published and checked, not what the rest of the layer ships.

• Price disclosure has started at the bottom of each range. RMB 699, RMB 3,671 and RMB 3,999 are all entry models. What the mid-range costs is still quoted rather than published, which is the normal state for a component market that has not yet standardised.

The usual limit applies, and one more with it. This is one show and one two-month window; and a layer selling business to business publishes less than one selling finished robots, so the absence of a number here is not evidence of the absence of volume.

Appendix. The 137 core-component companies

Alphabetical. Company names in blue link to that company’s page in the RobotToday supplier directory; a † marks a link that resolves to the parent group’s entry. All 137 companies in this table now have a directory page, so every name here is a live link. "Also" marks companies that also appear in Report 2 (robot systems) or Report 4 (software, compute and interaction); cross-layer companies repeat across reports rather than being assigned to one.