The Rise of Chinese Robotics
Unitree, Agibot, and whether the EV playbook will work for robots.
Chapter 9 of A Brief History of Embodied Intelligence
China’s advantage is in the hard parts: manufacturing, cost, speed. The challenge is in the soft parts: basic research, high-end chips, foundational models. The question is whether one can buy time for the other.
In late 2023, at the World Robot Conference in Beijing, a crowd gathered around a humanoid…
