Galbot introduces S1 for heavy-duty mobile manipulation

Galbot introduced S1 on January 20, 2026, describing it as an industrial-grade embodied-intelligence robot for heavy-duty manufacturing tasks. The Beijing company said the system supports up to 50 kg continuous dual-arm payload, eight-hour operation on a charge, autonomous battery replacement and visual positioning without QR codes or labels for production-line material handling.

The Company

Galbot, also known as Galaxy Universal, was founded in May 2023 by Wang He, an assistant professor at Peking University. Before S1, the company’s public work centred on G1, a dual-arm mobile robot, and embodied models including GraspVLA. In a 2025 interview with 36Kr, Wang described Galbot’s core skill focus as moving, picking and placing, with retail shelves, front warehouses and car-factory SPS sorting among the scenarios connected to that capability.

By mid-2025, Galbot had placed G1 into unattended pharmacy settings in Beijing, where robots picked medicines from shelves and delivered them to riders. The same interview said nearly 10 pharmacies were operating 24/7 with robots, and that Galbot planned to open 100 unattended retail stores across cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen that year.

Source: Galbot G1

The Product Line

G1 gave Galbot a mobile manipulation base for retail and service workflows, with Galbot’s product page listing up to 1.9 m horizontal reach and up to 10 kg payload. S1 kept the mobile dual-arm format and raised the product’s physical load claim, moving the line from shelf-level picking into heavier factory handling.

S1’s launch material described a 700 mm front working range, 2,300 mm vertical working height, 360-degree omnidirectional obstacle avoidance and an embodied handling model for production scenarios. It was reported a 32 kg load when the arms are fully extended forward, alongside the 50 kg maximum dual-arm payload.

The Launch

Galbot said S1 had entered CATL production lines and was operating autonomously without teleoperation. The company’s English launch announcement also named Bosch Group, Toyota, BAIC Group, SAIC Group and Zeekr as manufacturers it had partnered with to explore flexible manufacturing applications.

The CATL setting connects S1 to the same practical thread that ran through Galbot’s G1 work: start with a physical task, constrain the operating environment, then tune the robot around repeated handling. G1 handled retail picking and medicine movement; S1 took the company into factory material handling, where the disclosed measures are payload, reach, working height, battery continuity and marker-free positioning.

Maturity

S1 launched with a product page, public specifications and disclosed production-line use at CATL. Galbot did not publish fleet size, purchase structure, deployment duration or customer-side performance data, leaving the robot’s operating scale unclear.

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