Beijing edge-AI startup ModelBest unveiled a new embodied-AI model family called MiniCPM-Robot at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2026 in Shanghai, extending its widely downloaded MiniCPM series from phones and cockpits into humanoid and mobile robots.
An Edge-Only Embodied Model
MiniCPM-Robot is designed to run entirely on-device on robots, supporting real-time perception, dialogue and task planning without a cloud connection. It builds on the same "MiniCPM" edge-side foundation-model line that has racked up more than 38 million cumulative downloads on GitHub and Hugging Face since ModelBest, spun out of Tsinghua University's NLP Lab, first open-sourced the family in February 2024.
Live Demo With Leju Robotics
On the WAIC show floor, ModelBest paired with humanoid-robot maker Leju Robotics to run a venue-guide agent entirely offline on a Leju humanoid: the robot fielded natural-language questions from visitors against a local knowledge base and navigated obstacles autonomously without touching the internet. The pitch is a direct challenge to cloud-heavy competitors, arguing that a compact, on-device model is the practical path to reliable embodied AI in factories, cars, exhibition halls and homes where latency, privacy and connectivity all matter.
An Edge-AI Portfolio That Now Spans Phones, Cars And Robots
ModelBest already ships its SuperMate on-device cockpit assistant in production vehicles including the Changan Mazda EZ-60 and the Geely Galaxy M9, and its MiniCPM edge models have topped Hugging Face trending charts multiple times in the past year. Bringing an embodied-AI variant on stage at WAIC is a bid to secure a spot in China's crowded humanoid supply chain, where NVIDIA's Cosmos 3 Edge and Cosmos Coalition and Alibaba's Qwen-Robot suite have set an aggressive baseline for on-device robot reasoning.
The launch adds ModelBest to a WAIC 2026 roster that also featured ACE Robotics' Kairos 3.1 world model and a wave of new humanoid platforms from AGIBOT, MagicLab and Unitree.
Reporting based on coverage from Gasgoo Auto News, ModelBest, 36Kr and Pandaily.