The Thermal Paradigm Shift at WRC 2026: Why Humanoid Robots Need Liquid Cooling

1.Introduction
2.Air Cooling Versus Liquid Cooling in Robotics
3.BESTAR's Breakthrough
4.Applications
5.Conclusion

Introduction: A New Thermal Challenge on Display
Humanoid robots had showed on the 2026 World Robot Conference. Visitors watched robots run, jump and use their hands with impressive precision. But behind these dynamic movements is a growing problem that most people do not see. High performance robots consume a lot of power, and that power has to go somewhere. A large part of it turns into heat.
At the conference, industry research confirmed how sizeable this problem is. Some 90% of the energy required for a humanoid robot goes into heat. This heat builds up fast inside motors, joints, and control boards. In some of the most compact parts of a robot, like the joints inside a dexterous hand, the internal cavity gap is less than 2 millimeters. A standard 5 millimeter centrifugal fan simply cannot fit into that space. There is no room for it, no matter how the design is arranged.
This is the core conclusion coming out of WRC 2026. Traditional air cooling methods, the same ones used for decades in industrial equipment, are hitting a hard physical limit inside robot joints. Micro liquid cooling is becoming the only workable path forward for these tight, high heat spaces.

Air Cooling Versus Liquid Cooling in Robotics
It's useful to compare the two means of getting there directly so as to understand why this change is occurring.
The physical ceiling of air cooling
Air cooling has served industrial machines well for many years. The thing that humanoid robots just don't have enough are space and airflow.
Cooling Fan requires space to rotate. It requires a duct of air moving. The robot's joints and dexterous hand mechanisms are stuffed with gears, sensors, wiring and actuators. There is no open volume left for a fan or a duct.
Even if a fan could somehow fit, air itself is not a great carrier of heat. Its thermal conductivity is low. Inside a sealed, high heat density chamber like a motor housing or a joint enclosure, air struggles to pull heat away fast enough. The result is heat buildup, reduced performance, and shorter component life.
The structural advantages of micro liquid cooling
Liquid moves heat far more efficiently than air. Its thermal capacity and its thermal conductivity are both much higher. A liquid cooling loop can bring a core temperature down from around 100 degrees Celsius to below 60 degrees Celsius, and it can do this quickly.
Liquid cooling can be installed in areas that are inaccessible to conventional air cooling. Micro-channels and flexible tubing can be bent through a gap that is only a few millimeters wide. They will allow the robot to bend at the joints but will have no effect on the contour of the robot. This is what dense, compact, robot designs really require.

BESTAR's Breakthrough: Piezoelectric Micropumps and Integrated Liquid Cooling Modules
BESTAR has spent many years building deep technical experience in piezoelectric ceramics and precision manufacturing. This experience is now driving a new direction in microfluidics and thermal management for robotics.
The piezoelectric micropump: the engine at the center of micro liquid cooling
The heart of BESTAR's cooling solution is the piezoelectric micropump. A pump that is a variation of the traditional pump that is used to push liquid through the loop, is based upon the inverse piezoelectric effect. A very high frequency is generated by vibrating a piezoelectric ceramic disc, which in turn drives the fluid.
This design gives the pump three important advantages for robotics.
First, it is extremely small. The pump body can be built at just a few millimeters thick, thin enough to fit inside the 2 millimeter gaps found in dexterous hand joints and other compact structures.
Second, it has no rotating shaft and no bearing. That means no mechanical wear from friction and no bearing failure over time. This directly increases the working life and reliability of the pump.
Third, it produces no electromagnetic interference and runs quietly. There is no spinning motor generating electrical noise, and there is very little sound. This matters a lot in human robot collaboration settings, where a noisy or electrically noisy component near a person is a real problem.
A complete system: the BESTAR liquid cooling module
A pump alone does not solve the whole problem. BESTAR pairs the piezoelectric micropump with a custom built microchannel cooling plate to form a full circulation loop. Together, these two parts move a large amount of heat out of a very small volume. This is what engineers mean by high heat flux dissipation in a compact package.
Robot joints do not sit still. They bend, twist, and take shock loads constantly during operation. BESTAR's cooling modules are built for this reality. They use automotive grade sealing materials designed to resist vibration and repeated flexing without developing leaks. This is not a lab prototype level of durability. It is built to run continuously in a moving mechanical system.

Applications and Where This Technology Is Headed
The most immediate use cases for this technology are the parts of a humanoid robot under the most thermal stress.
Dexterous hands are a clear example. These mechanisms pack many small motors and sensors into a very tight space, and they generate a surprising amount of heat relative to their size. High power density leg and arm rotary joints face a similar challenge, since torque output keeps climbing as robot performance improves. Core control boards, which run continuously and handle heavy computing loads, also benefit from more effective, more compact cooling.
Looking at where the industry is heading, robot computing power and joint torque are both increasing year over year. As they climb, the heat problem grows with them. Active cooling using piezoelectric micropumps is on track to move from being an advanced option used only in flagship robots to becoming standard hardware across the next generation of high performance humanoid designs. Passive cooling and simple heat sinks will still have a role in lower power components, but they cannot handle the concentrated heat loads found in joints and hands anymore.

Conclusion
The insights coming out of WRC 2026 point in one clear direction. As humanoid robots move toward longer runtimes, higher intensity work, and around the clock operation, liquid cooling is becoming the practical replacement for air cooling in the tightest, hottest parts of the machine. Air cooling simply runs out of room and runs out of thermal capacity at the same time.
BESTAR is positioned at the center of this shift. Decades of piezoelectric ceramic expertise have been turned into a working thermal management product line built specifically for robotics. The combination of the piezoelectric micropump and the integrated microchannel liquid cooling module gives robot manufacturers a real answer to a problem that air cooling cannot solve.
Engineering teams working on next generation humanoid robots or compact smart devices are welcome to reach out to the BESTAR technical team. Sample testing for piezoelectric micropumps and liquid cooling modules is available, along with support for custom thermal solution design.