At the headquarters of China’s pioneering robot maker Unitree, visitors are invited to push and kick the G1 — a 1.3-metre-tall, silver humanoid — to test its balance.
The Hangzhou-based group is demonstrating the strength of its effort to transform the nascent industry to build humanlike machines. The robots are powered by open-source software that allows buyers to code them to run, dance or execute roundhouse kung-fu kicks.
Unitree leads a pack of Chinese start-ups in the sector — including AgiBot, Engine AI, Fourier and UBTech — garnering attention in recent months with made-for-social-media video demonstrations. During China’s big spring festival gala, 16 of Unitree’s H1 bots performed a synchronised folk dance during a live show broadcast to millions of viewers.
It was an impressive illustration of China’s capabilities in building humanoid hardware that may become the new frontier in US-China tech competition. Investment banks’ analysts predict the sector could produce the next widely adopted device after smartphones and electric vehicles, and Unitree’s chief executive and founder Wang Xingxing sees the industry experiencing a breakthrough “iPhone moment” within five years.
Goldman Sachs expects the global humanoid robot market to be worth as much as $205bn by 2035. Bernstein research analysts estimate annual robot sales of up to 50mn in 2050. Citibank forecasts 648mn humanoid robots by 2040, while Bank of America sees 3bn by 2060.
The US competition includes carmaker Tesla, big tech companies such as Google and Meta and robotics start-ups that include Boston Dynamics, Figure and Agility Robotics. For now, the big four industrial robot makers from Japan and Europe have focused on building collaborative robots to work alongside humans, rather than making humanoids.
But China’s deep electronics and EV supply chain has given the country a head start, according to researchers, with many of the components for humanoid robots already made in the country and included in electric vehicles.
They include actuators that convert energy into motion, as well as batteries and vision systems such as lidar. Still, the US has leading technologies for moving parts and Nvidia AI processors remain the brains of most humanoids, analysts say.
“China is very good at hardware, but [on] innovation and software, the US still has an advantage,” said Johnson Wan, an industrial analyst at Jefferies investment bank.
But components are so much cheaper in China that Bank of America analysts estimate the content in Tesla’s second-generation Optimus robot would cost about one-third less if Chinese parts were used rather than ones from non-Chinese suppliers. In one example, 25 Chinese companies provide components for dexterous hands, compared to just seven in the US.
The low-priced Chinese hardware has begun to open up the field to the kind of experimentation once concentrated in a few select labs and start-ups such as Boston Dynamics, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-off.
“There is a boom in humanoid research under way,” said Bruno Adorno, a reader in robotics at the University of Manchester. “It wasn’t possible before Unitree,” he said.
Bernstein analysts say China’s progress is comparable to how it has come to dominate the electric vehicle market. “China acts extremely fast in product and use case multiplication, while US players seem to shoot for the Holy Grail solution; China adopts the ‘natural selection’ approach with vastly diverse product models,” they said in a recent report.
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During the annual parliamentary meeting last month, Beijing deemed humanoid robotics a strategic industry to support and has begun lavishing funding on start-ups. Unitree founder Wang was recently given an audience with President Xi Jinping. The country’s security forces have experimented with using the start-up’s robodogs in exercises, although Unitree has stressed it does not sell its products to China’s military.
The company has raised money from big-name investors, including Sequoia Capital’s former China VC arm HongShan and delivery group Meituan. Government funds, including the China Internet Investment Fund, aligned with the country’s cyber regulator, and a state-backed Beijing robot fund are also invested, according to Chinese business records.
“AI-powered robots may not only be the future direction of development for China but possibly the entire world,” said Shen Zhengchang, a delegate to the country’s legislature. “China is striving to dominate the industry,” he told the Financial Times.
Chinese groups are also aided by a well-tuned industrial policy engine. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has published an ambitious road map for the industry charting a course to overcoming key technological hurdles. A new Rmb1tn ($137bn) state-led venture capital fund will add further financial firepower.
Local governments are also joining in and racing to woo companies and provide subsidies to build up the industrial supply chain. Government funds in Hangzhou are pouring money into the sector, while Shenzhen officials say they are working on a policy package and have introduced related subsidies and awards.
Shanghai has set up a state-backed training farm for the robots, where humanoids repeatedly perform certain tasks to garner the data necessary for them to carry out the manoeuvres on their own. State-owned Shanghai Electric, a backer of the project, says the facility houses 100 humanoids with plans to increase this to concurrent training of 1,000 general-purpose robots by 2027.
The goal is to lay the groundwork for humanoids to catch up with industrial robots, which have been built to specialise in handling one task over and over, making possible increasing factory automation. It would provide a commercial business model for humanoids that are short of use cases at their current technological level.
Chen Guishun, robotics head at Shenzhen-based industrial automation powerhouse Inovance, said there was great promise in humanlike robots, but not the flashy two-legged humanoid type going viral in videos.
“Bipedal movement is the least energy-efficient and most expensive solution,” he said. “Tracked or wheeled structures can achieve mobility just the same.”
Some local Chinese police units have begun to use robodogs and occasionally humanoids on neighbourhood patrols, while stores have begun employing humanoids for their entertainment value. Factories are in the initial phases of using humanoid robots on production lines.
For now, Unitree is sending most of its robots to universities and research labs.
Adorno said the company had lowered the cost of procuring a humanoid robot from up to $1mn to roughly $100,000 for its programmable H1 model. Unitree has made the code responsible for manipulating and controlling motors and sensors available for free, allowing his team to build on the platform.
“We’re developing novel techniques that improve the behaviour of the robot and unlocking capabilities by plugging into Unitree’s [application programming interface],” Adorno said.
Markus Fischer, a robotics specialist at German tech consultancy Exxeta, said the programming work needed to control humanoids was still extensive. He said it took about 10 days to program a G1 to walk freely around his office, navigating by the lidar — a sensor that uses light — in its head instead of remote control.
While problems like opening doors remain, Fischer said there was demand from customers interested in the humanoids’ entertainment and novelty value, such as greeting customers in retail shops.
Further on, Fischer expects taking inventory or stocking supermarket shelves with food will be possible, though he noted challenges remain.
“Grabbing stuff for humans is very easy,” he said. “We see a glass and we grab it and we know if we put too much force, we could break it, but the robot has to be taught to do that.”
Such daunting technical challenges have made some experts sceptical of the commercialisation path for humanoids. Prominent Chinese venture capitalist Allen Zhu recently told local media that his firm was exiting its humanoid investments.
Amid the hype, he noted only one new type of customer had emerged: “State-owned enterprises buying them to display at the front desk,” he said. “But that’s not the kind of customer we’re looking for.”
Gloria Li, Nian Liu and Wenjie Ding contributed reporting
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