At Berlin's IFA 2026, Chinese robotics firms crossed a threshold that exhibitions rarely capture cleanly: the distance between demonstration and deployment. Xiaomi, Unitree, and Pudu arrived not merely with prototypes but with machines already earning their place on factory floors, even as the living room remains a frontier too complex and costly to conquer. The spectacle of robots dancing and returning fist bumps drew the crowds, but the quieter story — a 94 percent surge in production and a market approaching $3.6 billion — belongs to the assembly lines and logistics halls where these machin