At the 2026 World Robot Conference held on August 19, Orbbec unveiled its first integrated hardware lineup for data collection without a physical robot body, featuring the first-person perspective device EGO, the handheld manipulation tool UMI, the wrist-mounted near-field sensor WristCam, and the synchronization hub Hub.

For a company that previously specialized in supplying "eyes" to robots, Orbbec is pushing its business one step further up the value chain, positioning itself as a provider of "shovels" for the data collection phase that precedes a robot's ability to perform tasks.

This strategic move is driven by the increasingly apparent data bottleneck facing embodied intelligence. While large language models can source text and images from the internet, robots tasked with physical operations such as grasping, assembly, and sorting require multimodal data encompassing motion trajectories, spatial coordinates, and real-world interaction feedback.

What Orbbec is targeting is precisely the hardware infrastructure used in this data acquisition process.

Among the newly launched products, EGO captures first-person views, UMI records human hand-guided operations, WristCam supplements close-range wrist data, and Hub addresses multi-device synchronization challenges. Under certain operating conditions, these devices can record continuously for over 37 hours, achieving zero frame loss for both RGB and IMU sensors, while multi-camera hardware synchronization error remains below one millisecond.

However, Orbbec has no intention of confining itself to merely manufacturing data collection equipment. Its larger ambition lies in building a comprehensive data platform.

"Given our significant market share, we are in a position to define standard interfaces that integrate data from gloves, arms, and other peripherals," said Orbbec founder Huang Yuanhao. He explained the underlying shift in logic: selling standalone hardware offers no customer stickiness, as clients can easily switch suppliers. But once the business is tied to data, the dynamics change fundamentally.

"Orbbec evolves from a hardware company into a data platform. Data is inherently linked to models, making its importance and stickiness incomparable to pure hardware," Huang added.

Still, whether this data platform vision can evolve into a sufficiently large business remains to be validated. Body-free data collection cannot entirely substitute the joint, torque, and tactile data generated by physical robots, and the industry has yet to settle on a definitive data pipeline or equipment standard.

Nonetheless, before robots reach mass-market deployment, investments centered on data have already commenced. Orbbec's objective is to secure its position at the forefront of this spending wave.

Currently, Orbbec has initiated its Hong Kong listing process to deepen its global expansion strategy, with its comprehensive data collection equipment portfolio forming a key component of its capital markets narrative.