Westlake Robotics, a startup from Westlake University in Hangzhou, has introduced WR1—a system it calls the universal brain for humanoid robots. In a demonstration video published on October 9, a humanoid operating on WR1 performs a series of complex actions: it takes corn out of the refrigerator, smoothly turns toward an air fryer, squats to lift a storage basket, tidies up scattered soft toys, and then goes to the bedroom to smooth the blanket, all without stopping to reboot between rooms.
The company claims that WR1 is based on dual pre-training, which includes a large brain and a small brain. This system integrates a world model with models of vision, language, and action, allowing it to perceive the environment, understand the task, and generate a sequence of full-body actions encompassing walking, torso posture, and dexterous hand movements. A General Action Expert, or GAE, functions as a motor cerebellum, tracking this sequence and maintaining the robot's balance. GAE was trained in two stages on large volumes of human motion data and uses an adaptive prediction mechanism to compensate for equipment latency.
To prevent interruptions during long tasks, WR1 maintains short-term and long-term memory of the robot's movement and generates actions in batches. The next batch is calculated in the background while the current one is executing, eliminating jerks upon updating. Westlake Robotics believes that most humanoids plan movement, posture, and hand work separately and are forced to stop before they can use their hands.
The company's main claim concerns laundry. In the demonstration shown, one humanoid picks up a pair of trousers from a swinging hanger, drapes them over its arm, adapting to the movement, and works with a second WR1 humanoid to transfer, spread, and fold them using dexterous hands. Both robots track each other and the changing fabric. Westlake Robotics calls this the first public demonstration of complete clothing folding by a humanoid with dexterous hands, although this claim has not yet been independently verified. Previously, WR1 folded clothes on a robotic arm platform, a separate setup that, according to the company, achieved a speed of 36 seconds per item at best.
Westlake Robotics was founded by Donlin Wang, a professor at Westlake University, and his co-founder Yu Zhang, a natural language processing researcher and professor at the same university. The company develops its own brain, full-body control, and humanoid hardware, focusing on home services, manufacturing, and specialized tasks.