At IFA 2026 in Berlin this week, a companion robot that reads bedtime stories, a robot dog that can tow 100 kilograms, and a floor washer that takes spoken orders sat in three different halls, sold by three different companies, at three wildly different price points. What they shared was a supplier almost nobody walked the show floor to see. All three, per the vendor, run Sunrise AI chips from D-Robotics — a Chinese silicon company two years removed from its spin-out and now positioned as the compute layer under the consumer robot category everyone is suddenly trying to invent.
IFA has spent two decades as a television-and-washing-machine show. This year it turned into a robot show. “This year, we’re seeing more humanoid robots at IFA than ever before. It shows that robotics, AI and new interfaces are becoming an increasingly integral part of people’s everyday lives,” IFA chief executive Leif Lindner told BGR. The interesting question is not which robot won the catwalk. It is who sells the brains.
Three robots, one bill of materials
TCL brought the hey AiMe, billed as a family companion-education robot, with 10 degrees of freedom of expressive movement, more than 20 sensors and autonomous navigation, at Hall 21, Booth 101. Worth noting: TCL’s own IFA materials call it the “AiMe Family Companion Robot” and name no chip supplier. The D-Robotics attribution comes from D-Robotics. No price or ship date has been announced.
Vbot made its European debut with the SuperDog at Hall 25, Booth 167. This one is real product, not concept: in mass production, CE-certified, in thousands of households since May 2026, with European pre-orders open at an expected $4,000. The spec sheet is unusually specific: a 594Wh pack good for roughly five hours, joint motors weighing 0.4 kg each with 24.5 Nm of peak torque, a 12 kg payload and up to 100 kg of towing capacity. The China-market sibling, BoBo, opened pre-orders at RMB 9,988, about $1,400 — a gap between SKUs that no source reconciles.
Rounding out the trio is xLean’s TR1 floor washer, fresh off a Kickstarter that pulled more than $2 million from over 2,000 backers. It launches at $949, nets out around $849 after deposit credits, and ships in Q4 2026. It is also the only one of the three with a publicly named part: the Sunrise X5, rated at 10 TOPS, driving 17,000 Pa of suction and dual 400 RPM rollers.
From car chips to living rooms
D-Robotics was carved out of Horizon Robotics in May 2024, taking the robotics half of a business built on automotive ADAS silicon. Investors have been enthusiastic. A $100 million Series A in 2025 was followed by $120 million in a Series B1 announced March 16, 2026 — Didi and Meituan Longzhu joining Hillhouse and Vertex Growth — and another $150 million in April, bringing the Series B to $270 million this year.
The product line is a ladder, visible in the shipping developer kits. The RDK X5 pairs a 10 TOPS Sunrise 5 with an octa-core Cortex-A55. The RDK S100 hits 80 TOPS at $625.99 on Amazon. The newest S100P claims 128 TOPS of INT8 on six Cortex-A78AE cores at 2.0 GHz plus four lockstep-capable safety cores and 24GB of LPDDR5, for $899 to $999. The company says the full portfolio spans 5 to 560 TOPS — with a footnote that should not be skipped: those are effective TOPS with 1/2 sparsity, which is not the same yardstick most buyers use. Around it sits an ecosystem D-Robotics puts at more than 100,000 developers across 20-plus countries, with Bosch Sensortec, Midea, Positec, UBTech and Fourier Intelligence on the customer list.
Why the compute has to be local
The reason a $949 mop needs a neural processor is arithmetic, not ambition. Cloud inference is a recurring per-unit cost against a one-time hardware sale, and consumer robot margins cannot absorb it. Vbot’s split is the emerging default: conversational reasoning goes to cloud language models — Qwen and MiniMax, in BoBo’s case — while perception, navigation and motor control stay on-device. A quadruped deciding in 20 milliseconds whether the thing ahead is a toddler or a table leg cannot round-trip to a datacenter. And a device carrying LiDAR, cameras and a four-microphone array through a European bedroom has a GDPR problem the moment that data leaves the house.
That is the strategic case for cheap edge silicon, and it explains the shape of the competition. Nvidia’s Jetson AGX Thor kit is formidable at 40 to 130 watts, but costs $3,499 — more than three SuperDogs of margin. Its $249 Orin Nano Super and the Orin NX 16GB, rated at 100 sparse INT8 TOPS at 25 watts, are the parts that actually compete, and D-Robotics prices the S100P explicitly against the latter. Qualcomm is arriving from above: its Dragonwing IQ10 robotics reference design claims 700 TOPS, with the family scaling to 7,000, and general availability landing this month. “As pioneers in energy-efficient, high-performance Physical AI systems, we know what it takes to make even the most complex robotics systems perform reliably, safely, and at scale,” said Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s group general manager for automotive, industrial and embedded IoT.
What to watch
Three things. First, whether the design wins hold outside China: a D-Robotics reseller told CNX Software of one newer part that “this product is currently targeted at the Chinese market,” with no availability announced elsewhere — a constraint that would cap the exact European ambitions on display in Berlin. Second, whether comparable benchmarks appear. Sparsity-adjusted TOPS against Nvidia’s published figures is not a fair fight in either direction, and OEMs will demand real numbers. Third, the quiet tell at IFA: the Zero W1 humanoid, not part of the D-Robotics announcement, was also described as running an eight-core Horizon Sunrise processor. If the family is turning up in robots its maker did not put in the press release, the platform play is further along than the booth count suggests.
“This year, we are seeing more humanoid robots at IFA than ever before. It shows that robotics, AI and new interfaces are becoming an increasingly integral part of people everyday lives.”— Leif Lindner, Chief Executive, IFA