Maniformer, a Shanghai-based physical AI data platform, won the All-Scenario Data Collection Technology Innovation Award at the Global Product Technology Innovation Awards during the IFA 2026 consumer electronics fair here, marking the first time a Chinese physical AI data infrastructure company has received recognition at the century-old exhibition.
The awards, established in 2014 by International Data Group (IDG) and the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) with annual support from IFA, recognise product technology innovation and industrial application value. Other winners this year include Samsung, Sony, LG, Siemens and Dyson.
Maniformer addresses what the industry sees as a critical bottleneck: as robots accelerate from labs to factories, commercial spaces and homes, scaling embodied AI models requires massive, high-quality real-world interaction data. Traditional collection methods relying on expensive robot hardware and fixed setups have limited scale and diversity.
The company’s MEgo series of “robot-free” data collection devices features a lightweight, wireless design that captures human manipulation activities across real-world environments without requiring a physical robot during collection. The system combines over 300° panoramic perception with wrist-mounted close-up imaging, millimetre-level trajectory reconstruction and sub-millisecond multimodal synchronisation across vision, depth, touch and inertial sensors.
Just days before the IFA opening, Maniformer announced the delivery of its 20,000th MEgo device and the accumulation of more than one million hours of real-world data – making it the industry’s first provider capable of mass-producing such devices and offering commercially available “robot-free” data at the million-hour scale. The dataset spans 22 major scene categories, over 10,000 real-world environments, more than 50,000 object types and 500-plus fine-grained tasks.
The award signals that real-world data collection is emerging as a new frontier of technological innovation in the AI and robotics industries, the company said. Maniformer plans to continue scaling real-world data collection, automated processing and standardisation to close the loop between real-world data and model iteration.
