Ina nondescript building in Beijing’s Zhongguancun district, sometimes called China’s Silicon Valley, a training session is taking place one sweltering July afternoon. In a small, cluttered lab at Chinese robotics startup Galaxea AI, a young employee toggles a switch to direct a base-mounted robotic arm to turn on a nearby lamp. His colleague records a pair of mechanical arms smoothing out a wrinkled bedsheet as they attempt to make a bed.

These images and video clips will be used to help train the company’s proprietary AI model powering its R1 series of wheel-based humanoids. Standing at 1.7-meters tall, they’re designed to assist in factories, and in the not-so-distant future, in homes. That’s an ambitious goal for a two-year-old outfit in an industry racing to deliver next-generation robots expected to transform daily life.

“Our industry is actually developing very fast,” says Xu Huazhe, Galaxea AI’s 32-year-old cofounder and co-chief science officer, from a meeting room at the company’s modest headquarters. “To show our own progress, we need to work harder and even faster.”

An honoree of last year’s 100 To Watch list of small companies and startups on the rise in the region, Galaxea AI derives its name from the words “galaxy” and “sea,” reflecting the cofounders’ shoot-for-the-stars ambition while navigating challenges along the way, says Xu. The first target, adds the soft-spoken Stanford-trained engineer, is to deploy the R1 robots across assembly lines at scale within the next three years.

Automation already plays a significant role in manufacturing, with China a global leader in installing industrial robots across its factory floors, alongside South Korea (which has the highest density of robots per 10,000 employees) and Singapore, according to Frankfurt-based International Federation of Robotics (IFR), a nonprofit supporting robotics research. Galaxea AI’s R1 humanoids are aimed at........

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