Westlake Robotics Unveils WR1 General-Purpose Brain, Demonstrates First Humanoid Clothes-Folding with Dexterous Hands
On October 9, 2026, Westlake Robotics unveiled its general-purpose brain system WR1. Built on a dual-pretraining architecture for a general-purpose high-level brain and low-level controller, WR1 enables end-to-end cognitive decision-making and whole-body motion control. The company also publicly demonstrated, for the first time, a humanoid robot folding clothes completely with its dexterous hands.
In the demonstration, a WR1-equipped humanoid robot took corn from a refrigerator, made a smooth U-turn toward an air fryer, squatted to collect scattered toys into a storage bin, and then moved to a bedroom to tidy a quilt. The robot completed the multi-room household task chain without pauses or restarts after scene transitions. In a separate collaborative task, two WR1-equipped humanoids worked together to take a pair of trousers from a swinging drying rack, support the garment on an arm, transfer it, spread it out, and fold it with dexterous fingers—marking the world's first public demonstration of a humanoid robot dexterously folding clothing.
WR1 combines a general-purpose brain module with a GAE (General Action Expert) module. The brain integrates world models and vision-language-action models to perceive the environment, understand tasks, and output full-body action sequences including locomotion, torso posture, and dexterous hand commands. The GAE module acts as a motor controller to ensure fast and stable execution. To address action discontinuity in dynamic home environments, WR1 introduces long- and short-term motion state review, real-time action chunking, and forward-looking delay compensation.
Earlier, a robotic arm platform powered by WR1 had achieved autonomous clothes folding in as fast as 36 seconds with a 100% success rate. The new demonstration extends this dexterous manipulation capability to a full humanoid platform. Westlake Robotics, the first achievement-transformation project of Westlake University in AI and robotics, says it will continue iterating WR1 to advance humanoid robots toward real-world applications in home services, industrial manufacturing, and special operations.
