VinRobotics Puts Vietnam’s First Humanoid on the Global Stage

VinRobotics, a robotics arm of Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup, brought the country’s first home-built humanoid robot to the floor at two of the world’s biggest technology gatherings over the past week. The VR-H3 appeared at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA, the field’s main academic meeting) in Vienna and at Computex Taipei, the kind of stage Vietnamese hardware almost never reaches.

The debut lands in a market that already has a hard pecking order. Chinese makers shipped close to nine in ten of the humanoids sold worldwide last year, and Vietnam is arriving from a standing start.

Vietnam’s First Humanoid Reaches an International Stage

For a robot built by a company that did not exist two years ago, the VR-H3 packed a busy schedule. From late May into early June, VinRobotics walked the machine through a run of robotics and trade events across Europe and Asia, putting it in front of academic researchers, industry buyers and the general public in the same fortnight.

On ICRA’s opening day, the robot drew a crowd for a teleoperation demo: an operator drove it using motion-capture built into a virtual-reality headset, with no extra gloves or rigs strapped on. In a hall full of research robots, a remote-piloted humanoid that needs only a headset to control is the sort of party trick that gets people to stop and film.

The platform turned up at five separate showcases over the stretch:

• ICRA 2026 in Vienna, the field’s flagship academic conference
• Festival der Roboter 2026, an outdoor robotics festival staged alongside ICRA
• Vietnam Robot Tech Day 2026, a technology-diplomacy event co-run with the Embassy of Vietnam in Austria
• Computex Taipei, the region’s largest computing trade show, held June 2 to 5
• Technical talks shared with names like Google DeepMind, NVIDIA and Boston Dynamics

Across the open-floor settings and the packed exhibition booths, VinRobotics says the robot held stable footing, moved without bumping into the crowd, and handled fiddly manipulation tasks. You can read the company’s framing of its technology stack on VinRobotics’ own robotics technology page, which positions the firm around in-house automation and AI rather than bought-in parts.

Inside the VR-H3 Build, Tested on a VinFast Line

VR-H3 is the third generation of humanoid VinRobotics has built, and the company makes a point of how much of it is its own work. The mechanical structure, the real-time computing and electrical/electronic (E/E) architecture that wires the body together, the power distribution platform, the battery system and the full-body AI (artificial intelligence) control software were all developed in-house by Vietnamese engineers.

Hardware Engineered In-House

The robot runs on more than 31 actuators and carries two onboard edge computers, so it processes what it sees on the body rather than phoning home to a server. It can perceive its surroundings, interact with people, carry loads of 6 to 8 kilograms, move objects around, and perform assembly steps. At Computex, the company showed a variant carrying cargo containers, waving, and running its hands through dexterous movements with several degrees of freedom, exhibited inside the Intel-backed Robotics and Edge AI pavilion that pushes processing onto the device itself.

From Show Floor to Factory Floor

The more telling test happened off the trade-show circuit. A version of the robot was put to work inside a VinFast electric-vehicle plant, lifting and moving an automobile door frame weighing about 5.5 kilograms while dodging obstacles on its own, at an average pace near 0.6 metres per second and a top speed around 1 metre per second. That jump from staged demo to a real production line is something plenty of better-funded humanoid firms have not pulled off yet. The build cadence has tightened too: the first-generation robot took eight months to complete, and VinRobotics says the cycle is now down to three or four.

Why Vingroup Is Running Three Humanoid Startups

Here is the part most of the coverage skips. VR-H3 is not Vingroup’s only humanoid program. The conglomerate behind VinFast cars and a sprawling property empire is bankrolling three separate humanoid companies at once, each with its own brand, leadership and product line.

VinRobotics launched in late 2024 with charter capital of roughly $40 million, aimed at automation and industrial robots. VinMotion followed in early 2025 with about 1 trillion dong ($38 million) in capital, structured so the group holds 51% and chairman Pham Nhat Vuong and his two sons hold the rest; it has since approved a $12.75 million investment into a US-based research unit. VinDynamics, the newest of the three, unveiled its own humanoid, Dyno, at the same ICRA and Computex events where VR-H3 appeared.

The common thread is VinFast. The carmaker already runs more than 1,200 robots across its factories, which gives all three startups a captive industrial customer to test against before anyone tries selling abroad. Vingroup’s broader play across electric vehicles, AI and data sits on the conglomerate’s corporate overview pages, and humanoids are the newest line item.

The Scale Vietnam Is Walking Into

The contrast with the established players is steep. The global humanoid business is concentrated in a handful of Chinese firms that are already shipping in volume while Vietnam is still showing prototypes.

• Close to 90% of the humanoid robots sold worldwide in 2025 came from Chinese makers
• 5,500 humanoids sold by Unitree last year, making it the world’s top seller
• 5,168 units shipped by Shanghai-based AgiBot, second on the list
• Up to 94% projected growth in China’s humanoid output this year, per research firm TrendForce

Tesla’s Optimus, by comparison, missed its 2025 production target of 5,000 units, though the company said it began mass production of a third-generation Optimus at its Fremont plant in January. The depth of China’s lead has a structural cause. “Chinese humanoid robotics vendors are using more and more local components in their robotics design,” said Lian Jye Su, an analyst at research firm Omdia, who ties the advantage to policy support, public money and a mature supply chain. Beijing wrote humanoid robotics into its 14th Five-Year Plan back in 2021, and the latest TrendForce reading of China’s humanoid output has Unitree and AgiBot alone taking close to 80% of the country’s shipments. Against that, a debut robot lifting a door frame is a small number. The press release itself concedes the race is led by the United States, China and Japan.

An Open-Source Move and a Route to Real Work

VinRobotics paired the debut with a strategy announcement that cuts against the secrecy most hardware firms guard. The company said it will gradually open-source selected foundational robotics technologies, opening up parts of its stack so outside researchers and developers can build on it. For a latecomer with no installed base, giving away core code is a way to attract a developer community faster than catalogue sales ever could.

The commercial groundwork is being laid at home first. In April, VinRobotics signed a strategic memorandum of understanding (MoU, a non-binding cooperation agreement) with MobiFone Digital Solutions, a unit of one of Vietnam’s largest telecom operators, aimed at pushing humanoids toward real applications and commercial scale. The pitch from the top is that Vietnam can be a producer in this wave, not a spectator.

We believe humanoid robots and embodied AI will soon become an integral part of both daily life and industrial operations, and Vietnam is fully capable of becoming an active contributor to this technological wave with products developed by Vietnamese engineers.

That was Ngo Quoc Hung, chief executive of VinRobotics, who framed the European tour as a real-world test bench rather than a marketing stunt. He cast the international outings as a way to refine the platform under genuine operating conditions, with the factory work feeding back into the next build.

For now the gap between ambition and output is wide. VR-H3 is a debut machine that has moved one door frame on one line, set against rivals shipping thousands of units a year. The first real proof that Vietnam can build humanoids at scale will come from inside VinFast’s own plants, long before it shows up on any global sales chart.