Composites maker Swancor Advanced Materials is debuting Quester1, a shape-shifting personal robot that switches between wheeled bipedal and quadrupedal forms on a single chassis, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) opening in Shanghai on Friday, 17 July 2026. The launch pushes the Taiwanese materials group into a still-emerging category of multi-morphology consumer robots.
One Chassis, Two Forms
Quester1 uses what Swancor calls a "transformer cross-morphology integrated architecture," enabling fully automatic switches between a wheeled bipedal stance and a quadrupedal walking mode without user intervention. Swancor says the reconfiguration lets the robot pick the best form for the environment, targeting home companionship, outdoor escort and personal filming as the initial use cases.
China's Shape-Shifting Robot Push
Quester1 sits inside a broader Chinese-market push into deformable robotics. Unitree Robotics launched the 2.7-metre, 500-kilogram manned GD01 mecha in May, marketed as the first production-ready manned transformer, and LimX Dynamics unveiled a 3-in-1 modular embodied-AI robot at the end of 2025. Southern University of Science and Technology this year showed the GrowHR soft-bodied extendable robot, which weighs less than 20% of a rigid robot of similar size. Analysts told Global Times the move reflects a shift from lab prototypes to market-ready platforms.
WAIC 2026 Is A 300-Product Stage
WAIC 2026's exhibition floor tops 100,000 square meters for the first time, hosting more than 1,100 companies, over 3,000 exhibits and roughly 300 global product debuts. Both the intelligent-computing and embodied-intelligence tracks feature more than 200 companies each. Quester1 launches alongside expected debuts from major Chinese players — including Huawei's Atlas 950 physical unit and MiniMax's M3 multimodal model — as China's humanoid output targets top 100,000 units this year and the ecosystem broadens beyond dexterous-hand foundation models.
Reporting based on coverage from Global Times.