How U.S. Army research helped China’s robot dogs run
By Michael Martina
WASHINGTON, Aug 18 (Reuters) - Unitree Robotics has become China’s biggest name in robot dogs, with a portfolio that stretches from a $1,600 consumer quadruped to machines shown on Chinese state television carrying rifles alongside People’s Liberation Army troops. But the engineering DNA of those products traces back to research funded by the U.S. military, according to a former U.S. defense technology official and three researchers who worked on the projects.
The company’s rapid rise — it sold more than 5,500 humanoids and 18,000 quadrupeds last year, according to company filings, and is now valued at about $9 billion ahead of its Shanghai IPO — rested in part on open publications from a U.S. Army-sponsored research alliance, the sources said. Unitree’s Go2, launched in 2023, helped it dominate the global market for four-legged robots, but its lineage is deeply American.
“Basically, the first Unitree robot that had any kind of scale” came out of an Army-funded project, said Gavin Kenneally, who worked on the program at the University of Pennsylvania and later founded Ghost Robotics, a U.S. maker of military robot dogs.
Ben Katz, who worked at MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab, said the dimensions of Unitree’s popular Go series were “to the millimeter” almost identical to Mini Cheetah, a robot he helped develop. Mini Cheetah grew out of years of work funded by the Army Research Laboratory and DARPA.
Reuters is the first to detail the connections between Unitree’s designs and the Army program.
Behind the robot dog boom
The Army-funded effort, known as the Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance, brought together researchers from UPenn, MIT, Boston Dynamics, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and General Dynamics Land Systems between 2010 and 2020. In 2016, UPenn researchers removed heavy central gearboxes and placed motors directly in robots’ legs, making it easier for machines to feel and react to terrain. In 2019, MIT’s lab unveiled Mini Cheetah, adding strength and the ability to do backflips.
Months before that debut, Katz published a master’s thesis describing Mini Cheetah’s actuators. Within six months, he said, Chinese manufacturers were selling copies online. “You could buy them on AliExpress,” he recalled.
Unitree was founded in 2016 by Wang Xingxing, then 26. In his master’s thesis from Shanghai University, Wang cited MIT’s earlier Cheetah work and acknowledged its “pioneering” contributions. He also referenced the UPenn paper produced under the Army program. Unitree says on its website that it “independently developed the motors, reducers, controllers, and even some sensors” of its quadruped robot.
Katz said he did not pursue production of his actuator design because he assumed there was no market. China’s speed in commercializing the technology, he added, ultimately helped the whole field: “Robotics has advanced a lot because of the availability of actuators.”
Joao Ramos, who worked alongside Katz at MIT, said Unitree copied the shape, structure and design of Mini Cheetah. But he credited the company with doing “proper engineering” to turn a lab machine into a mass-market product. “The actual practical implementation, bringing it to real life, that’s all on them,” Ramos said.
When open science meets industrial policy
The episode highlights a broader anxiety in Washington: the United States is good at inventing, but less good at manufacturing what it invents. Chinese companies, backed by subsidies, dense component clusters and a tolerance for losses, have captured global markets in solar panels, drones, electric vehicles and quantum communications — many of which originated with U.S. government support.
Beijing’s ambition has been explicit since 2015, when President Xi Jinping set out a 10-year plan to lead industries including green energy, electric vehicles and robotics. China’s robot sector also benefits from the country’s dominance in critical minerals used for magnets and from the density of motor, gear and actuator suppliers clustered near Unitree’s base in Hangzhou.
No U.S. company has mass-produced robot dogs or humanoids. Tesla has shown prototypes of its Optimus robot but has not scaled production. Boston Dynamics, which sold a different robot-dog design, told a congressional hearing that Chinese pricing could force U.S. firms out of the market. Kenneally’s Ghost Robotics has shipped roughly 1,000 Vision 60 robots to military and government customers, but they sell for upwards of $165,000 and production is far below Unitree’s.
Jaret Riddick, a former director of the Army Research Laboratory, oversaw the robotics project. He said it did kick-start a U.S. quadruped industry, but without support for large-scale manufacturing, Unitree “just kind of consumed that space.” ARL spokesperson Amanda Ligon said the research “strengthened the broader U.S. robotics ecosystem” and was published openly to stimulate progress, a common practice. ARL referred questions about Unitree’s commercialization to the Pentagon, which declined to comment.
Vijay Kumar, dean at Penn Engineering, said the U.S. excels in innovation and software development but needs to ensure the capital, industrial base, highly skilled workforce and parts supply chains to scale up breakthroughs. Reyk Knuhtsen, a robotics analyst at SemiAnalysis, called the U.S. failure to commercialize domestic research a “dropped ball.” Venture capital has favored software startups with high returns, he said, and trade barriers alone will not create a manufacturing ecosystem. “This is a very big hill for the U.S. to climb,” he said.
The Pentagon added Unitree in June to a list of Chinese military companies, a designation that limits U.S. military use but stops short of sanctions. In July, the Federal Communications Commission moved to ban imports of future foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots, including Unitree’s. An FCC spokesperson said the commission was protecting Americans from foreign threats and preparing the country to deliver on President Trump’s vision to lead the world on the next generation of technologies. China’s embassy in Washington defended its companies as making new technologies affordable and accessible internationally, and accused the United States of abusing administrative power and engaging in “market distortion and unilateral bullying.” China has threatened to retaliate to the FCC ban.
Most of the experts who spoke to Reuters said such trade restrictions were reasonable but not sufficient. The real gap, they said, is in the industrial base needed to scale breakthroughs.
“This isn’t just a competition between U.S. and Chinese robotics companies,” Kenneally said. “It’s between private U.S. companies and China’s coordinated national strategy.”
Robot dogs in uniform
Unitree has said its products are for civilian use, and in 2022 it joined U.S. companies in signing an open letter pledging not to weaponize robots. But Chinese state television has shown Unitree’s Go2 accompanying PLA troops, and a modified B1 robot firing a mounted rifle. In October, another Chinese company’s robot dogs appeared in coverage of PLA mock beach landings.
The U.S. military has also experimented with the machines. In September 2023, the U.S. Army obtained a waiver from federal rules requiring American-made products in order to buy two Unitree Go2s, saying there were no sufficient U.S.-made alternatives “of a satisfactory quality.” That same month, U.S. Marines attached a rocket launcher to a Unitree Go1 for remote firing. Reuters could not determine whether the Army purchases went ahead.
Ghost Robotics has sought to reduce its reliance on Chinese supply chains. Founder Kenneally said motors now come from South Korea, but it remains difficult to avoid Chinese magnets and metal components. South Korea’s LIG Defense & Aerospace bought a 60 percent stake in Ghost Robotics last year for $240 million, and the company is exploring production in Taiwan.
“We need to work closely with our allies,” Kenneally said. “There’s absolutely no path forward without them.”
Unitree, China’s State Council and China’s defense ministry did not respond to requests for comment. The White House did not respond to requests for comment about U.S. industrial policy.
(Reporting by Michael Martina; additional reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco, Eduardo Baptista and Ryan Woo in Beijing; editing by Frank Jack Daniel)