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As Elon Musk touted plans to eventually manufacture an army of Tesla bots in Silicon Valley this month, humanoid robots were already being produced and sold to consumers in China.
Chinese and U.S. companies have begun a battle to build the world’s best bots. While it’s early days, experts say China is leading in the quantity of robots delivered to consumers, while America is ahead in the quality of robots demonstrated.
Musk danced with Tesla’s Optimus bots at his company’s shareholder meeting and outlined plans for a factory in Fremont that he said will someday have the capacity to build a million bots a year, which would sell for around $20,000 in today’s dollars. One of China’s leading robotics companies, Unitree Robotics, already has a humanoid robot on the market that can walk, dance and perform basic tasks. Its least expensive version costs around $6,000.
Tesla robot Optimus serves popcorn to guests at the Tesla Diner on the restaurant’s opening day on July 21.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
While the inexpensive Unitree bot is far less sophisticated than Optimus, its early entrance into the real-world market at an affordable price demonstrates China’s edge. The country has the parts, the production facilities and the pool of labor required to bring the rapidly evolving robots to market quickly and cheaply, said P.K. Tseng, an analyst at the tech consulting firm TrendForce.
“The U.S. leads in technological innovation, while China excels in speed of implementation,” he said. “The real turning point will arrive when humanoid robots move beyond R&D prototypes to large-scale deployment.”
The International Federation of Robotics, IFR, estimates that there are at least 80 humanoid robot companies in China, five times that of the U.S. A Morgan Stanley report on humanoid robots earlier this year estimated that Chinese companies had more than twice the number of robots unveiled than U.S. companies since 2022, while Chinese organizations have applied for more than three times the number of patents using the word “humanoid” in the last five years.
At the forefront is Unitree, which went viral in January after its humanoid robots performed a Chinese folk dance live, marching rhythmically while tossing and twirling handkerchiefs. That model, which costs about $90,000, won the opening race at the inaugural Beijing Humanoid Robot Games in August, taking 6½ minutes to run about one mile.
Students from the Primary School Affiliated to Hefei Normal School interact with the humanoid robot “Xiao An” after a science class on Oct. 27 in Hefei, Anhui province, in China.
(China News Service via Getty Images)
The company has become a Chinese tech darling and is preparing for an initial public offering with a reported valuation as high as $7 billion.
The ultimate goal of a general-purpose robot, one that can package goods, do household chores and assist in surgical procedures, is still years away. Humanoid robots are not yet fully autonomous and are mostly purchased by hobbyists, research institutions or manufacturers. Hyundai Motor Group is deploying robots made by Boston Dynamics in its car factories. In China, humanoid robots are also bought and rented as entertainment, to dance and perform at events.
According to TrendForce, the latest generation of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot greatly surpasses the products of China’s top manufacturers, including Unitree, in body and hand versatility, load capacity and battery life. Another advantage U.S. robotics companies have is advanced artificial intelligence capabilities, which will be crucial in developing robots that can learn to carry out basic human tasks on their own.
Musk says Tesla’s edge is that it has the engineering capability to build limbs, AI to run the brains, and the manufacturing know-how to mass-produce the bots. He projects that the movements of the next generation of Optimus will be indistinguishable from those of humans.
“It will seem as though there’s someone like a person in a robot outfit,” he told shareholders this month. “Really, it’s going to be something special.”
His prediction recently came true — in China. EV maker XPeng demonstrated its latest bot this month and its casual gait was so human-like that the company had to convince some skeptics it was a robot by bringing heavy scissors on stage to cut away its synthetic skin and reveal its mechanical insides.
By prioritizing commercialization, Chinese manufacturers are leaning on government support and manufacturing prowess for an upper hand in the latest frontier of a tech rivalry with the U.S., similar to how it came to dominate other industries like solar panels and electric cars.
“They’re not first mover in anything. But they’re building a lot of robots, selling them really, really cheap, and just trying to get them out in the world,” said Erik Walenza-Slabe, a managing partner of Asia Growth Partners, a Shanghai-based consultancy that helps businesses expand in Asia. “That might be a better strategy in the long term.”
Morgan Stanley estimates that the humanoid robot market will be worth $5 trillion by 2050, at which point China would probably have nearly four times as many humanoid robots in use as the U.S. Even as U.S. robot makers like Tesla expand production, their efforts could be hampered by a reliance on components that need to be sourced from China, such as screws, motors and batteries, the bank’s analysts said.
A robot rehearses the 100-meter race before the opening ceremony of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August.
(Ng Han Guan / Associated Press)
While China’s mass deployment may help its companies beat the U.S. to real-world training, public mishaps have highlighted the limitations of Chinese technology and the potential risks to human safety.
During the first robot half marathon in Beijing this year, many mechanical competitors fell down and overheated and only six out of 21 completed the course. Last December, a Unitree bot fell over and started convulsing at a demonstration, drawing online mockery.
Meanwhile, the trade war between China and the U.S. could impede the development of better bots by both sides.
Both countries have sought to build and leverage their strengths in high-tech fields. The U.S. has restricted exports of semiconductors to China, in an effort to stymie its rival’s technological development. Meanwhile, China has a near monopoly on rare earth metals, a critical component in batteries and computer chips, and has stepped up export controls to squeeze the U.S. and other nations.
To achieve self-sufficiency, China has made advanced robotics a key tenet of its national strategy for technological and economic development. Earlier this year, China announced a state-backed venture fund to raise and invest $138 billion in robotics and artificial intelligence.
“What China has wanted to do ever since they entered the robotics game is to circumvent the dominance of traditional technology by foreign vendors,” said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst for AI and robotics in Asia at Omdia, a research firm. “The only reason why China can do that is because they have policy support.”
The lack of similar government policies in the U.S. could hamper efforts to compete with China, said Susanne Bieller, general secretary of the IFR, particularly as deployment and data become central to training robots with artificial intelligence.
“In China, the government is encouraging companies to test out the new technology and that’s a critical advantage. That’s something American startups investing in humanoids will have to work much harder for,” she said.
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Stephanie Yang
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