China robotics humanoid: After AI, China unicorns are eyeing global domination in robotic humanoids
Beijing-based Linkerbot completed its $3 billion “series B+” financing round last week. It was not stated when the next financing round would be launched or whether the previously undisclosed $6 billion valuation was targeted in a private investment round or initial public offering.
Leading early backers of the two-year-old unicorn include Alibaba’s Ant Group and Sequoia subsidiary HongShan Group, while state-backed Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank of China Asset Management and Fosun Capital participated in the final round, the company said in a statement on Thursday.
Linkerbot now holds more than 80 percent of the global market share in high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) robotic hands and plans to scale production from almost 5,000 now to 10,000 units per month “soon”, CEO Alex Zhou told Reuters in an interview.
Investor interest in China’s humanoid robot industry has increased this year after market leaders such as Unitree showed off their products’ astonishing technical advances in a widely watched TV performance and humanoid robot half marathon in Beijing last month. Unitree filed for an initial public offering in Shanghai in March, seeking a valuation of up to $7 billion.
Unlike rival humanoid makers like X Square Robot, which focuses on training robotic hands for household chores, Linkerbot specializes in high-value human labor.
“We don’t just handcraft it. Our goal is to replicate the entire library of human dexterous skills within our hardware,” Zhou said, referring to the LinkerSkillNet platform, which the firm claims is the world’s largest real-world dexterous manipulation dataset. The platform is a multi-modal data acquisition system that transforms human skills into standardized, reusable capabilities for robotic hands. 500 skills so far.
“The hand is the most complex part of the humanoid robot. Elon Musk has stated several times that this part took more than half of all the engineering work for Tesla’s Optimus,” said Georg Stieler, head of robotics and automation at technology consultancy Stieler.
Musk promised that the newest Optimus model, due to be released this spring, will have “the dexterity of a human.”
Chinese Invention
Inspired by his childhood love of Doraemon, the Japanese cartoon robot cat who keeps an endless array of tools in his pocket, CEO Zhou imagines his robots playing the piano, giving massages and even doing dentistry: skills he says are “at least three times the added value of basic labor.”
Linkerbot’s hands can already rapidly turn screws, grasp deformable soft objects, thread a needle, and perform high-precision manufacturing. The company supplies some of China’s leading humanoid robot manufacturers, as well as some foreign industrial giants; however, the company refused to disclose this due to confidentiality agreements.
The basic O6 lightweight model can carry a 50kg payload despite weighing just 370g; performance, Zhou said, is a key advantage for industrial applications where miniaturization and power are required.
Zhou said the company produces key components such as connection modules, motors and reducers in-house and uses special polymers that are self-lubricating and corrosion-resistant.
Besides industrial environments, Linkerbot’s hands are also used by research institutes and leading global universities. The company has more than 400 employees and five factories in Beijing and Shenzhen, and is developing smart production lines where robotic hands produce other hands.
Analysts say the biggest obstacle to widespread use of humanoids in factories is their cost, which ranges from $100,000 to $150,000 per unit for leading industrial models from Unitree, AgiBot and UBTech. But Linkerbot says its hands are easier to deploy.
“Chinese factory owners are extremely pragmatic. They have realized that two arms and a pair of dexterous hands are enough for most factory jobs,” Zhou said.
“Currently, most of our customers are mounting our hands onto existing robotic arms rather than purchasing a full humanoid robot,” he said.
