Humanoids

Tien Kung 3.0 Reads a Work Ticket and Checks a Live Cabinet

Robb Harlan 4 min read

Day two of the World Robot Conference in Beijing put a humanoid in front of a bank of high-voltage cabinets, not a boxing ring.

Global Times photographed Tien Kung 3.0 at the X-Humanoid booth on August 20, holding a tester against the gear. A company representative told the paper the stack pairs X-Humanoid’s in-house HuiSi KaiWu embodied-intelligence platform with State Grid’s large language model. The pitch: read an operation ticket, interpret the job, walk the aisle, inspect the cabinet. The same representative said there are already benchmark deployments in several provinces.

Tien Kung 3.0 humanoid reaching a test probe toward high-voltage cabinets at WRC 2026
Tien Kung 3.0 on an energy-inspection mock-up at WRC. Source: Tao Mingyang / Global Times.

The rest of the floor was jobs, not dances

The same Global Times dispatch, tied to a 2026 Humanoid Robot Industry Development Report released Thursday at the show, is full of shipment totals. I am parking those. The machines on the floor are the story.

At the National and Local Co-built Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center booth, a firefighting LingLong L2.0 made its first public run: shut a gas valve, cut power, aim an extinguisher, no remote. A WeiLong M2 handled casualty transfers. A XunLong quadruped searched simulated rubble.

Robot++, from Zhejiang, showed wall-climbers that stick to carbon steel with permanent magnets, grind weld coatings, then run magnetic-particle and ultrasonic tests. Engineer Zhao Dekui told Global Times that inspecting a 3,000 cubic meter spherical tank takes workers 15 days to a month with scaffolding. The robots finish grind-plus-inspect in four days without it. One unit covers curvature down to a 2.5-meter diameter. Another mounts a humanoid upper body on the climbing chassis and swaps end tools.

CGTN, covering the same conference on August 20, puts the show at more than 300 companies (69% more than last year) and more than 3,000 exhibits, including more than 300 debut products. It also describes a 1.35-meter, 39-kilogram Tiangong Omni climbing plum-blossom piles and stairs, plus a separate 4-meter electro-hydraulic giant aimed at nuclear, deep-sea, and heavy-load work. Those are different machines from Tien Kung 3.0.

Four-meter-class humanoid on a WRC 2026 booth with hydraulic-looking arms
A separate heavy humanoid on the WRC floor, not Tien Kung 3.0. CGTN describes a 4-meter electro-hydraulic machine for nuclear, deep-sea, and heavy-load work. Source: CGTN.

Tien Kung 3.0 itself is not a new name. X-Humanoid launched the platform in February. What is new this week is the inspection cell on the show floor, wired to a utility model, with a company saying it already has provincial sites.

A Human’s Take

I will take a probe on a live cabinet over another kung-fu loop. Reading a work ticket is the part that usually dies in a demo: the robot has to know which switch, not just how to stand.

“Several provinces” is still a phrase. The next receipt is a named substation and a shift count, not a booth crowd filming the cabinet row.

Sources