The United States is the leading country in robotics development, with advanced humanoid robot prototypes and releases from companies such as Tesla and Boston Dynamics surprising the public with their performance demonstrations. Not to be outdone, many Chinese companies are spurring the development of robotics products by collaborating with Nvidia.

Among the 14 humanoid robotics companies introduced by NVIDIA, we will introduce products from five Chinese humanoid robotics companies, following the four American robotics companies. (View previous series - USA)

■ Tsinghua University Startup Robot Era 'Star 1'
Robot Era, founded by researchers at Tsinghua University in China, has developed the first humanoid robot, Star1, featuring a total of 55 degrees of freedom. It has achieved a maximum speed of 3.6 m/s through actual outdoor driving tests. The company explained that the three-degree-of-freedom waist allows natural walking, running, and jumping.

Star 1 is 171cm tall and weighs 63kg, and can handle up to 20kg. Robot Era developed X-Hand 1 to maximize the details of the robot hand. It has 12 self-actuating joints, 12 degrees of freedom, and a high-resolution tactile sensor.

The main processor, which serves as the brain, integrates the Intel and NVIDIA Orin platforms and performs calculations with a processing capacity of up to 275 TOPS for reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and end-to-end large models. It is equipped with edge hardware and peripherals such as finger tactile sensors, vision cameras, and interactive screens.

Last October, STAR1 released a video of its humanoid robot running through the Gobi Desert, emphasizing that its humanoid robot runs faster than the Unitree H1.

■ China Money Hundreds of Billions of Investment Unitree 'G1·H1'
Unitree introduced its new robot G1 last year, following the existing H1. It is 130cm tall and weighs 35kg. It features △3D lidar and depth camera △2-hour battery life △maximum joint torque of 120N m △maximum 43 degrees of freedom △8-core CPU △movement speed of 3.3m/s. It is said that the battery life is short but can be replaced.

The new Unitree G1 has a short body and a simplified number of parts, so its initial product price is $16,000, which is about 23 million won at the current exchange rate. On the other hand, the H1 product is 180cm tall and weighs 47kg, making it a size suitable for industrial facilities. The H1 is priced at $90,000, which is more than five times more expensive than the G1.

It is known that the company has received investment worth hundreds of billions of won, including Series C round investment so far. Unitree participated in this year's CES 2025 and introduced the new G1, leading the expansion of the Chinese humanoid market.

■ Mass-produced 1,000 humanoid robots, Ajibot 'A2'
Shanghai-based Agibot's humanoid robot A2 is 169cm tall and weighs 69kg. It features a replaceable battery life of 2 hours, over 40 degrees of freedom, a large-scale language model combined with RAG, a multimodal mapping system, and 3D lidar and six cameras.

Ajibot announced in October last year that it would produce 300 humanoid robots for conversational services and marketing services within the year, and recently announced that about 1,000 general-purpose in-body robots had been shipped from its Shanghai factory. It is said that these are mainly marketing and conversational service robots, and that the home humanoids have not yet reached the mass production stage.

Last month, Ajibot open-sourced a large-scale humanoid training dataset needed to advance AI robot training. AgiBot World Alpha supports precision manipulation, tool use, and multi-robot collaboration based on over 100 real-world scenarios in five domains.

■ Fourier's 'GR-2' to conquer the rehabilitation medical field market
The Fourier GR-2 is the next-generation product developed following the first-generation humanoid robot 'GR-1'. It is 175 cm tall, weighs 63 kg, and has a battery life of 2 hours, the same as previous robots. It features: △12 degrees of freedom robot hand with 6 array-type tactile sensors △Total 53 degrees of freedom △Maximum torque 380 N m FSA 2.0 actuator △Support for NVIDIA Isaac Lab·ROS·Mujoco frameworks △1.3 m/s, etc.

It provides a load capacity of 3kg per robot arm, and, like previous Chinese robots, it adopts a detachable battery to compensate for the short battery life. Unlike previous products, it strengthens the packaging by embedding the wires, and it explains that it reduces manufacturing costs by improving debugging and enhances the ability to learn and transition from AI simulations to actual applications.

Fourier envisions the use of robotics in the fields of rehabilitation and assistive technology. We plan to expand our market by utilizing robots to solve rehabilitation problems in the medical field, and we have recently taken steps to enter related fields, such as signing an MOU with the University of Malaya Medical Center in Malaysia and participating in Medica 2024, a medical industry trade fair in Germany.

■ Unmanned Pharmacy/Store Solution Collaboration Galbot 'G1'
Galbot, which attracted 200 billion won in investment in just one year, introduced the G1 in June of last year. It is 173cm tall and weighs 85kg. It has the following features: △arm length of 190cm, △torso lift of 65cm, △maximum reach of 240cm, △10-hour work time, △5kg payload, and △simulation platform Nvidia Isaac Sim·Mujoco.

Founded in May 2023, Galbot is a general-purpose robot development startup that focuses on developing robots with artificial general intelligence (AGI). It has established research and development centers in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Suzhou to conduct AI research, and plans to mass-produce commercial, industrial, and home humanoid robots starting in 2026.

In cooperation with China's Meituan, a pharmacy service robot is about to be launched, which can pick up and carry medicine with both hands or put it on the shelf. Galbot will cooperate in building a 24-hour unmanned pharmacy, and will carry out comprehensive and in-depth cooperation on robot capacity enhancement services in offline retail, smart warehouse, smart logistics and other fields.