How US military-funded robotics helped China scale robot market

China’s Unitree Robotics has emerged as a global leader in quadruped and humanoid robots, but the technology behind some of its most successful robot dogs can be traced to research financed by the US military, according to an analysis by Defense News.

From US research to Chinese scale

Unitree’s $1,600 Go2, launched in 2023, helped the company rapidly expand its presence in the global quadruped robotics market. The company sold more than 5,500 humanoid and 18,000 quadruped robots last year and is now valued at around $9 billion ahead of its stock market debut.

The technology underpinning its designs benefited from advances made through the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance, which operated from 2010 to 2020 and brought together researchers from institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Boston Dynamics and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Gavin Kenneally, a former University of Pennsylvania researcher who participated in the program, said the Army-funded work became “basically, the first Unitree robot that had any kind of scale.”

MIT researcher Ben Katz told Reuters that the dimensions of Unitree’s popular Go series were “to the millimetre” almost identical to the Mini Cheetah, a pioneering quadruped robot developed through U.S.-funded research.

Unitree’s founder, Wang Xingxing, cited MIT and University of Pennsylvania research in his 2016 master’s thesis and acknowledged the laboratories’ contributions.

Innovation versus industrial capacity

The episode does not indicate that Unitree obtained the research improperly. The U.S. military-funded findings were publicly published to encourage wider scientific progress.

The larger issue, DefenseNews notes, is what happened after publication. While U.S. researchers developed key technologies, Chinese manufacturers were able to commercialise similar advances rapidly, benefiting from dense supply chains, government support, component manufacturers and the ability to tolerate lower margins.

“This isn’t just a competition between U.S. and Chinese robotics companies,” said Kenneally, the Ghost Robotics founder. “It’s between private U.S. companies and China’s coordinated national strategy.”

U.S. robotics researchers interviewed by Reuters did not advocate restricting government-funded research. Instead, they argued that Washington needs policies that help domestic companies move discoveries from laboratories into factories.

Vijay Kumar, dean at Penn Engineering, said the United States needs the capital, industrial base, skilled workforce and supply chains necessary to scale technological breakthroughs.

A growing security concern

The stakes are increasingly military. Chinese state television has shown Unitree robots accompanying PLA troops, including a modified B1 robot equipped with a rifle. The U.S. military has also experimented with Unitree platforms, while Pentagon restrictions on the company have increased.

In June, the Pentagon designated Unitree a contributor to China’s defence industrial base. The FCC has also banned imports of future models of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots, including Unitree products.

Yet restrictions alone may not solve the underlying problem.

Unitree’s rise demonstrates that technological leadership depends not only on inventing advanced systems but also on manufacturing them at scale. As Kenneally put it, without broader industrial support, China “just kind of consumed that space.”

For Washington, the challenge is therefore bigger than Unitree. It is about rebuilding the industrial capacity needed to turn publicly funded American innovation into competitive products before rivals do.

By Sabina Mammadli