Chinese tech giant Ant Group’s subsidiary, Ant Lingbo Technology, recently showcased its first humanoid robot, R1, at the IFA exhibition, officially entering the global AI robot competition. This robot is seen as a competitor to Tesla’s Optimus.
At the 2025 Berlin International Consumer Electronics Show (IFA), R1 demonstrated cooking shrimp, and it also made an appearance at the 2025 “Inclusion・Bund Conference” held in Shanghai.
R1 is a multimodal perception and interaction robot with multimodal recognition capabilities, able to automatically identify various ingredients and kitchen utensils on the countertop, accurately locating food and tools. The entire process from ingredient selection, cooking, to cleaning is automated without human intervention. Additionally, R1 has applications in various scenarios such as tour guiding and medical consultations. In medical settings, the robot can perform basic consultations through voice interaction and provide preliminary suggestions based on patient symptoms. The tour guiding function supports multiple languages, automatically planning sightseeing routes and explaining points of interest.
Unlike competitors focused on hardware, Ant Group concentrates on developing the AI brain for the robot, viewing humanoid robots as a means to popularize AI chatbots and assistants through its large language model.