There’s a flywheel here: The more units a company sells, the better deals it can negotiate with suppliers and the more money it can spend optimizing its manufacturing process. Larger sales volumes also allow a company to bring more components in-house. This allows the company to push costs even lower, which will mean more sales and even more money to invest in improving the production process.
Over a few years, this flywheel helped DJI to dominate the global drone market. SemiAnalysis argues that Unitree is on track to do the same thing for legged robots.
According to SemiAnalysis, Unitree has developed its own motors, gearboxes, lidar sensors, and cameras. “Unitree’s self-produced motors can run as low as 30-40% of equivalent Western motors,” SemiAnalysis reports. “They now make some of the cheapest humanoid gearboxes in the world.”
This could enable Unitree to take over the global market for quadruped and humanoid robots in much the same way that DJI took over the global drone market.
Of course that’s not guaranteed to happen. Unitree has a number of Chinese rivals. Unitree is the global leader in quadrupeds, but a Chinese rival, AgiBot, has sold more humanoid robots than Unitree in recent months. There are also many smaller robot companies in China that could challenge Unitree and AgiBot in the coming years.
But Unitree does not face much competition in the United States or the West more generally. Boston Dynamics sells excellent robots, but they tend to be significantly more expensive. There are a number of American startups aiming to build humanoid robots, including Tesla, Figure, and 1X, but consumers cannot buy a robot from any of these companies today.
That has alarmed some American policymakers. In June, a bipartisan group in the House introduced a bill to restrict importation of Chinese robots. The official press release for the legislation mentioned Unitree by name. Then in July, the FCC imposed broad new regulations on foreign-made robots that are likely to impact Unitree and other Chinese companies.
However, the robot market is global. Even if Chinese companies get locked out of the US market, Unitree or one of its Chinese rivals could still come to dominate the global market for humanoid robots.
There’s an obvious parallel here to electric vehicles, where Chinese companies like BYD are effectively banned from the US but are making rapid gains in the rest of the world. There’s a risk that a ban on Chinese robots could have a similar impact: rather than hampering the growth of companies like Unitree, it could make the US a robotics backwater.
Tim Lee was on staff at Ars from 2017 to 2021. He recently launched a new newsletter, Understanding AI. It explores how AI works and how it’s changing our world. You can subscribe to his newsletter here.