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Opinion
China’s robot revolution may not arrive in the way you expect
Electric vehicles generally travel abroad as finished, branded products. Chinese robotics could spread differently
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Billy Huang is a media veteran who has worked at leading organisations across the Pacific, including Xinhua News Agency in Beijing, CNN headquarters in Atlanta, MediaCorp in Singapore, KyLinTV in New York and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.
China’s robots have become skilled at commanding a stage. At last month’s World Robot Conference in Beijing, humanoids sorted parcels, packed phones and performed household chores. Unitree Robotics, whose machines can run, dance and perform martial arts, made an equally dramatic entrance on the Shanghai stock market, closing its first day of trading at more than five times its offer price.
The spectacle is real, and so is the engineering achievement behind it. However, this can obscure a more useful way to think about China’s robotics boom. Two different bets are taking shape. One asks how much capability can be packed into an increasingly versatile body. The other asks how much useful intelligence can travel across different bodies.
Unitree is a leading example of the first approach. Its strength in locomotion and motion control has helped push Chinese humanoids forward at remarkable speed, yet founder Wang Xingxing has also been candid about the software challenge ahead. He said last month that a breakthrough allowing robots to handle unfamiliar environments and tasks could come in two or three years in an optimistic case, or it could take as long as a decade.
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