This is the first time in the history of the Spring Festival Gala that a humanoid robot has appeared in a comedy skit, and it is also the first time a consumer-grade humanoid robot has taken the stage.
On New Year's Eve 2026, during the comedy skit "Grandma's Favorite," renowned performing artist Cai Ming plays the role of Grandma, arguing with her grandson played by Wang Tianfang, while standing beside them is Bumi, the adorable "robot grandson" developed by Noetix Robotics, along with its “brothers.”
Several robot grandsons can act cute, tell jokes, perform magic tricks, and do backflips, showcasing impressive skills and emotional value! Who could have imagined that the "Judo seventh-dan" robot from 1996 would become a gentle and caring grandmother 30 years later, while robots have transitioned from a sci-fi dream into reality, even reaching a price point of ten thousand yuan.
Unlike many other robot programs, this time, the humanoid robots do not dance; instead, they become part of the storyline. They have lines, interact, and display emotional reactions. What the audience sees is not a performance demonstration but a continuous show featuring four types of robots, including Bumi, the N2 little rascal, the E1 long jump champion, and custom bionic humanoid robots, all performing together in a cramped 12-square-meter space with professional actors.
In this imaginative vision of the future, robots entering households and moving into daily life seems not so far off. Furthermore, the price of 9998 yuan makes this vision shift from "the future" to “an attainable future.”
01.
Why did the Spring Festival Gala choose Bumi?
In 2026, the humanoid robot industry stands at a delicate technological crossroads. Over the past five years, this field has been caught up in the frenzy of "parameter competition," with everyone focusing on backflips, running speed, and joint torque. Each company is striving to prove, "I can jump higher, run faster." But an awkward question remains unresolved: Why do consumers need an Olympic champion-level robot?
Industrial scenarios are willing to pay for extreme control, while research institutions are willing to pay for cutting-edge parameters. However, what home users want is not world records, but a "living creature" that can interact, is safe, and is willing to stay in the living room.
Noetix Robotics is one of the earliest companies in the industry to recognize this gap and proactively pivot. Its choice is not to "make a cheaper robot," but to rethink from the product definition side: what should a humanoid robot look like as a consumer product?
The Spring Festival Gala in 2026 attempted to showcase a future for humanoid robots that is "deliverable, iterative, and popular." While the outside world commonly focuses the humanoid robot race on "who can perform more complex flips" and "who can run a faster gait," the gala presented another direction: turning robots into consumer products, rather than exhibition items, making Noetix Robotics’ robots stand out.
And the "Bumi," priced at 9998 yuan, is the first milestone on this path.
“Bumi” is a product released by Noetix Robotics in October 2025 and is a typical product of this Spring Festival Gala. It is currently the only biped humanoid robot in China that has successfully achieved mass production with a price below 10,000 yuan. In the common understanding of the industry, a lower price often means "reducing specifications," cutting degrees of freedom, lowering motor specifications, and compressing structural costs. However, the development logic of Bumi is just the opposite: it does not downscale from industrial-grade products but reconstructs from the interaction goal while ensuring absolute safety.
The starting point of this reconstruction is a simple question: how should a robot that is willing to interact with family members move? The answer is not "faster, stronger," but "lighter, softer." Adults walk with smooth center of gravity shifts and vigorous gaits; when children run, their center of gravity has a greater fluctuation, landing lighter, and their arm movements often lag behind their step frequency. These two modes of movement are not a linear relationship of size scaling, but completely different dynamic characteristics. If adult motion capture data is simply compressed to child height, the resulting gait would be a rigid miniature version of an adult rather than a natural child's.
Noetix Robotics' solution is to actively set limits at the hardware level. The torque limit of Bumi's foot motors is locked at 10N.M, and the landing contact force is restricted to under 100 Newtons. These two sets of values are far below the capability limits of similar products, but they are the physical basis for a light gait; too much torque leads to jerky starts, and too high landing impact makes each step sound like stomping. It is precisely this constraint derived from the product that makes it more human-like.
Behind the 9998 yuan price is a complete logic that reverses hardware parameters based on interaction experience. It is not about making industrial robots cheap but about starting from scratch to create a consumer robot.
With hardware boundaries established, the algorithm layer begins to fill in the content. The team invited children aged 3 to 8 for motion capture, redirecting the data to Bumi’s skeletal structure. The challenge of this process lies not in capturing accuracy but in retaining the characteristics of children's actions. In a running motion, adults synchronously initiate arm movement and step frequency, while children raise their arms only after gaining speed.
To replicate this detail, the algorithm team designed a reward function within a reinforcement learning framework: the robot receives extra rewards for swinging its arms after reaching a certain speed threshold; swinging too early results in no reward. After hundreds of rounds of policy iteration, Bumi ultimately presented that natural moment of “raising arms after taking off” on the Spring Festival Gala stage.
The training cost for this action is 21 complete dance routines and over 300 reinforcement learning strategies. Each dance style—folk dance, street dance, and mechanical dance—corresponds to a separate set of strategy networks, accumulating training data covering actions like flips, cartwheels, single-leg steps, and 360-degree turns. The training environment is not an ideal laboratory, but rather a real scene that incorporates interference variables such as ground materials, lighting distractions, and actor positional deviations. The 12-square-meter performance area at the Spring Festival Gala is merely a field test of this system's generalization capability.
For Noetix Robotics, a company that has only been established for a little over two years, the Spring Festival Gala is more like a pressure test for its technological roadmap.
02.
Redefining Consumer-Grade Humanoid Robots
From another perspective, the consumer-grade products showcased in the Spring Festival Gala face their true test not on stage, but in delivery.
The humanoid robot industry has long faced an invisible cost black hole: each robot is a customized machine. Tolerance of structural components, motor response differences, and assembly consistency. These issues can be masked by engineers "tweaking" a single demonstration unit, but once production scales to hundreds or thousands, the debugging costs rise exponentially. This is why many robotics companies can create a stunning prototype but fail to produce a batch of stable products.
However, starting in 2025, Noetix Robotics will industrialize its engineering capabilities and standardize its production processes, meaning that the Bumi purchased by users for ¥9998 will have no fundamental difference in motion performance from the Bumi on the Spring Festival Gala stage.
.jpg)
Noetix Robotics is also advancing its channel development simultaneously. It is reported that nationwide, the company has developed over 50 regional channel agents and established partnerships with several educational solution providers. These channels not only serve as sales pathways but also as after-sales and data feedback nodes, with Noetix Robotics forming deep collaborative relationships with domestic distributors.
The pricing of ¥9998 is possible because the cost structure has been optimized from the product definition stage.
The Bumi, operating in real-world scenarios, continuously feeds back interaction data and operational logs: what actions children enjoy making it perform, the optimal speech rate for recognition accuracy, and how long it can run before joint heat issues arise. This data is integrated back into the algorithm iteration process, forming a closed loop of "delivery - feedback - optimization." Product delivery is not the endpoint of R&D but the starting point for data accumulation.
Parallel to the consumer-grade products, the systematic engineering of motion control technology is also advancing. N2, a small mischievous robot, is the industry's first humanoid robot product to achieve continuous somersaults. The outside world often attributes this capability to algorithm breakthroughs, but the essence of somersaulting is a systems engineering problem rather than a singular algorithm issue.
When a humanoid robot can't flip over, it can adjust its algorithms; if it flips over but doesn't land steadily, that indicates a structural issue. If it lands steadily but falls apart after multiple flips, it points to material problems. Noetix Robotics' design strategy focuses the machine's mass at the center of gravity, with lightweight limbs forming a "spherical distribution." This design sacrifices some static stability, making the robot less stable when upright compared to traditional designs, but it gains controllability during high-dynamic actions. At the moment of landing after a flip, momentum is concentrated at the center of gravity, and the limbs do not bear excessive impact loads. This design reduces reliance on control algorithms at the structural level and provides redundancy for future hardware upgrades.
The choice of motors reflects the same thinking. The high-speed, high-torque motors equipped for the N2 exceed the performance limits required for the actual movements seen in the Spring Festival Gala. This reserves a physical foundation for future, more complex maneuvers, such as continuous backward flips and aerial posture adjustments. The hardware capabilities are ahead of the current algorithmic demands, which is the engineering team's prediction of the technological trajectory, as motion control algorithms evolve rapidly while modifications to mechanical structures take much longer. Hardware redundancy is a strategy to cope with uncertainties.