On February 4, 2026, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala broadcast to approximately 730 million viewers. Among the performers: a fleet of Galaxy General Robotics Galbot G1 robots, operating autonomously on live television, rolling walnuts in their palms, picking up glass fragments, handing objects to human actors, and retrieving items from densely packed retail shelves. No teleoperation. Fully autonomous. This article covers the engineering behind that performance and what it signals for Galbot in 2026.
Why the Spring Festival Gala Matters
The CCTV Spring Festival Gala is the most-watched annual broadcast in human history. Companies appearing on it are not selected by marketing, they are designated by state broadcasters as national exemplars of Chinese achievement. Galaxy General Robotics being chosen as the 2026 Gala robot represents state-level confidence that no trade show demonstration can replicate. The tasks performed were not choreographed position sequences. Walnut rolling requires real-time tactile adjustment. Picking glass fragments requires sub-centimeter visual localization plus sub-Newton force control. Retrieving items from cluttered shelves requires selective manipulation, grasping the target without disturbing adjacent items. These define the frontier of robot dexterity.
Galbot G1 Technical Specifications
Wheeled humanoid. Height 173 cm, weight 85 kg, 47 total DOF. Dexterous hands: 12 DOF per hand (24 total). Omnidirectional wheeled base, 360 degrees. Two 7-DOF force-controlled arms. Trunk: 3 additional DOF. The 12 DOF hands enable fingertip manipulation: pinch grip on 5 mm objects, three-finger power grip up to 500 g, and palm manipulation (the walnut-rolling capability). AI stack: Galaxy General Robotics proprietary embodied large model, multimodal, trained on visual, language, and action data, general-purpose rather than task-specific.
Industrial Deployments Before the Gala
By 2025, Galbot G1 had delivered thousands of units to BAIC and CATL. The CATL deployment is significant: CATL battery manufacturing requires contamination control, materials qualification, and precision that are substantially more demanding than standard factory environments. In August 2025, a Galbot G1 fleet won the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games Medical Scene championship, sorting all 9 medicine boxes in 10 minutes 22 seconds. The task requires grasping diverse package shapes, maintaining correct medication identification, and zero error tolerance, validating Galbot dexterity for pharmaceutical logistics and hospital applications.
$300M Funding and HK IPO
In December 2025, Galaxy General Robotics completed a financing round exceeding $300 million, the largest single-round investment in embodied intelligence at the time. Bloomberg reported Galbot picked Citic Securities, Huatai Securities, and UBS Group to manage a Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO application expected in early 2026. At $300M raised and HK IPO in preparation, Galbot is capitalized alongside AgiBot and Unitree in the top tier of Chinese humanoid funding.
Wheeled Humanoid Competitive Position
Galbot G1 and AgiBot G2 are both wheeled humanoids targeting industrial deployment. The differentiation lies in the arms and hands. Galbot’s 12-DOF hands per arm are among the most capable on the market. AgiBot’s G2 claims sub-millimeter assembly precision with 0.5 N force control. Galbot competes on dexterity, AgiBot on precision and data scale. Bipedal competitors (Unitree G1, UBTECH Walker S2, Fourier GR-3, Leju KUAVO) offer mobility for environments with stairs or height variation. For flat-floor factory tasks, wheeled platforms win on stability and operational predictability.
Full competitive field: Top 40 China Robot Rankings 2025. Factory context: robot manufacturers in China.
Sources
- Global Times: Humanoid robots at Spring Festival Gala grab headlines (February 2026)
- Bloomberg: Galbot picks banks for HK IPO (December 2025)
- 36Kr EU: Galaxy Universal Robots at Spring Festival Gala (2026)
- Galbot: $300M funding round announcement (December 2025)
