Beijing Galbot opened IFA Berlin 2026 with Booth 160 in the IFA Next innovation zone, running live G1 wheeled-humanoid demos of shelf retrieval, crowded-floor navigation and dexterous object handling with no operator in the loop. The Beijing-headquartered startup — three years old and the highest-valued unlisted humanoid company in China — arrived in Hall 25 exactly 38 days after the US Federal Communications Commission added its exact hardware category to the Covered List, effectively barring new Galbot G1 imports into the United States.
What visitors actually see on the floor
The G1 is not a bipedal walker. It is a wheeled semi-humanoid mobile manipulator: 173 cm tall, 85 kg, with two 7-DoF arms, 12-DoF dexterous hands, 47 total degrees of freedom, a 5 kg payload per arm and a 10-hour battery life that matches a full commercial shift. Compute is an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 64GB in the standard configuration, upgrading to a Jetson Thor in the G1 Premium. In a Beijing pharmacy licensed as China's first for robot-assisted dispensing, one G1 handles 5,000 SKUs at what Galbot reports as 99.5 percent pick success in a roughly 70-square-meter footprint, and more than 170 autonomous Galbot Store retail units are live across 40+ Chinese cities, including a FamilyMart in Beijing's Zhongguancun district.
AstraBrain is the real story
The G1's commercial performance rides on AstraBrain, Galbot's integrated "brain–cerebellum–neural control" AI stack. Three Vision-Language-Action models run on the same hardware — GraspVLA for object manipulation, GroceryVLA for retail sequencing and TrackVLA for pure-vision navigation and person-following — with a world-model planner on top that simulates outcomes before the robot moves. Training runs in NVIDIA Isaac Sim across billions of simulated interactions with heavy domain randomization, allowing zero-shot generalization to new packaging without per-object teleoperation. Galbot cites 95–97 percent grasping success across deformable snack bags, glass bottles and rigid containers, and one-day deployment into a new retail location because TrackVLA replaces LiDAR pre-mapping.
The catch European buyers keep hearing
China's National Intelligence Law (2017) obliges all Chinese organizations and citizens to support state intelligence work on demand, and that obligation follows the manufacturer, not the device's physical location. A Galbot deployed inside a German factory, UK pharma lab or Dutch warehouse still collects a continuous visual and operational record of the site through its cameras and sensors, and no procurement contract removes the underlying legal duty. The EU has no equivalent to the FCC's July 28 Covered List action, and no independent third-party security audit of the G1 has been publicly documented. Network segmentation is the strongest available mitigation, but it removes the technical pathway, not the legal condition.
Galbot's bigger IFA context
Galbot is not alone in Hall 25: AGIBOT is at H25-371 and EngineAI at H25-349, joined by DEEP Robotics, Unitree, Primebot and others on Saturday's Robots on the Runway show. IFA counted 932 Chinese companies among 1,900-plus exhibitors this year — an acceleration, not a retreat, since the FCC action. Galbot itself has raised roughly $800–$900 million (post the $372 million March 2026 round led by the National AI Industry Investment Fund, Sinopec and CITIC) at a $3 billion valuation and is reportedly lining up a Hong Kong IPO at up to $4 billion, hot on the heels of AgiBot's own HK$50 billion Hong Kong listing plans and XPENG Robotics' $900 million round at a $6.3 billion valuation.
Reporting based on coverage from TechTimes, IFA Berlin and Gasgoo Autonews.