Highest Honor: The Highest Tier and an Extremely Low Win Rate Define the Award’s Prestige
The CES is organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) of the United States and is one of the world’s largest and most influential consumer technology trade shows. Its official Innovation Awards are independently judged across three dimensions: engineering and functionality, design and user experience, and innovation and uniqueness. They have two tiers: Honoree and Best of Innovation. Honoree is awarded to products that meet the scoring benchmarks for their category, while Best of Innovation is awarded to the product with the highest overall score in each category, making it the highest honor in the CES Innovation Awards system.
Competition for this award is extremely fierce. For CES 2026, the official Innovation Awards received more than 3,600 product applications, yet only 43 products received Best of Innovation, a win rate of approximately 1.2%. According to the organizers, the number of applications for the 2027 Innovation Awards has once again reached an all-time high.
In this year’s robotics category, products including Booster, Agility, Qiyuan, and the AgiBot Dexterous Hand received Honoree,while Galbot ET1, on the strength of the highest score, took homeBest of Innovation (Best Innovation Award), becoming the product in the robotics category to receive this highest-tier honor. This also means that Galbot ET1 received the highest ratings from the international judging panel across the three dimensions of engineering and functionality, design and user experience, and innovation and uniqueness.
The key to Galbot ET1’s award win lies in its demonstrated native-agent capabilities. Unlike traditional robots that depend on preset motion programs or pre-collected motion data, Galbot ET1 can visually observe human movements in real time, recognize and extract their trajectories, and then learn and reproduce new movements on the spot. It requires neither pre-produced motion-capture data nor prerecorded motion videos. This ability to “watch, learn, and act” enables the robot to advance from executing preset motions to autonomous learning and real-time interaction, and constitutes Galbot ET1’s distinctive technological differentiation.
Other CES Best of Innovation winners this year included innovative achievements from leading global technology companies, such as NVIDIA’s Vera CPU, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Reality Elite platform, and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8. Galbot ET1 joined these internationally leading technology products on the highest-tier winners list and took the highest innovation honor in the robotics category, marking international recognition by an authoritative global technology award for China’s embodied intelligence robotics innovations.
Technical Core: Three Dimensions Map to Advanced Capabilities, Excelling at“Learning by Watching”
Measured against the three CES judging dimensions, Galbot ET1’s technical strengths are clearly discernible. In engineering and functionality, it integrates perception, interaction, and motion into a tangible product experience, turning “I see, I think, I act” into practical capabilities; in design and user experience, verbal feedback, bodily movements, and interaction pacing work in concert, making it more natural and approachable when welcoming guests, interacting in playgrounds, and performing on stage; in innovation and uniqueness, its core differentiator lies in learning new movements on the spot through visual observation while developing agent-level learning capabilities—combining visual perception with language-based interaction to understand environmental and task requirements, plan courses of action, and invoke mobility and interaction capabilities to proactively engage with people and attract customers, moving from completing a single action to understanding tasks and organizing behavior.
Behind this are Galbot’s independently developed AstraBrain-WBC general-purpose cerebellum foundation model, more than one million hours of human motion data, and the AstraData data foundation. The data includes both high-precision motion-capture data and motion data extracted and retargeted from human videos on the internet, continuously providing high-quality support for training the general-purpose cerebellum model.As a result, Galbot ET1 does not need motion-capture data or recorded videos to be prepared in advance for new actions; it can learn and reproduce them on-site through visual observation. More importantly, it can combine visual and language understanding to comprehend task requirements in real-world settings, plan its actions, and invoke its mobility and interaction capabilities, exploring more autonomous approaches to interaction and task execution.
Accelerating Industry Adoption: From International Awards to Real-World Scenarios
On October 22 this year, at the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference, Galbot and Unitree Robotics jointly announced that Galbot ET1, the world’s first native agent robot, was co-developed by the two companies, marking significant progress in upstream and downstream coordination within the humanoid robotics industry.
In terms of commercialization, Galbot ET1’s prices were announced in September this year, with three versions launched: the Basic Edition at RMB 79,000, the Professional Edition at RMB 139,000, and the Flagship Edition at RMB 179,000. These are tailored to needs including motion demonstrations and interactive experiences, active learning and dynamic planning, as well as scientific research, development, and enterprise customization. Within 24 hours of opening preorders, more than 200 units were reserved.
Galbot ET1 has now entered Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Guizhou, and other locations, where it is exploring application scenarios such as commercial demonstrations and interactive experiences. The introduction of its tiered pricing system and its continued deployment in real-world settings mean that humanoid robots are no longer merely products that demonstrate technology on exhibition stands; they are beginning to deliver application value tailored to specific user needs.
The CES 2027 Best of Innovation award is the highest recognition of Galbot’s achievements to date and provides international authoritative validation of its technological roadmap, product philosophy, and industrialization direction. Galbot will take this as a new starting point and continue advancing the real-world deployment and application of humanoid robots. Through its capability path of “I see, I learn, I act,” Galbot ET1 is demonstrating a viable direction for bipedal humanoid robots to advance from technological breakthroughs to product maturity, and from global competition to real-world applications.
