China’s Unitree Robotics has become one of the world’s biggest producers of humanoid and quadruped robots, but some of the technology behind its most successful robot dogs traces back to research funded by the US military, according to a former US defence technology official and three leading researchers involved in the work.
Unitree’s $1,600 Go2 model, launched in 2023, helped the company rapidly expand its position in the global quadruped robot market. The company is now valued at about $9 billion ahead of its stock market debut, after selling more than 5,500 humanoid robots and 18,000 quadrupeds last year, according to company filings.
The connection emerged from a US Army-funded robotics programme whose findings were deliberately published openly to advance the field. Gavin Kenneally, a former University of Pennsylvania researcher involved in the programme, said the project effectively became “the first Unitree robot that had any kind of scale”.
Ben Katz, who worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab as part of a consortium of universities funded by military programmes, said the dimensions of Unitree’s popular Go series were almost identical, “to the millimeter”, to Mini Cheetah, a groundbreaking robot he helped develop.
The US Army funded the Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance between 2010 and 2020, bringing together researchers from government, universities and industry. In 2016, University of Pennsylvania researchers including Kenneally developed robots that placed motors in their legs rather than relying on heavy central gearboxes, improving their ability to sense and respond to terrain. The work built on research at MIT funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
In 2019, the MIT team presented Mini Cheetah, which incorporated features developed at Pennsylvania and added greater strength, including the ability to perform backflips. Months earlier, Katz had published his master’s thesis detailing the robot’s actuators. Within six months, he said, Chinese companies were manufacturing copies that could be bought on AliExpress.
Unitree was founded by Wang Xingxing three years before the Mini Cheetah was presented. In his 2016 master’s thesis from Shanghai University, Wang cited MIT research on earlier versions of the Cheetah and referenced Kenneally’s Army-funded work. He also described potential future applications in “defense, security, family and education”.
The researchers do not describe Unitree’s use of the publicly available US research as improper. Joao Ramos, who worked at the MIT laboratory alongside Katz, said Unitree copied the Mini Cheetah’s shape, structure and design but credited the company with carrying out the engineering required to turn the concept into a mass-produced machine.
That commercial success has exposed a broader weakness in the US approach to advanced manufacturing. While the United States has excelled in innovation and software development, China has combined subsidies, dense manufacturing clusters and extensive component supply chains to scale emerging technologies.
Unitree sold more than 18,000 quadrupeds last year, while no US company has mass-produced comparable robots. Kenneally said the competition was therefore not simply between American and Chinese robotics companies but between private US firms and China’s coordinated national strategy.
The military implications are becoming increasingly visible. Chinese state television has shown Unitree Go2 robots alongside People’s Liberation Army troops, as well as a modified B1 series robot firing a mounted assault rifle. Unitree has maintained that its products are intended for civilian use and signed an open letter in 2022 pledging not to weaponise robots.
The US military has nevertheless used Unitree technology. In September 2023, the US Army secured a federal waiver to purchase two Go2 robots because there were insufficient US-produced alternatives of satisfactory quality. Whether those purchases proceeded could not be established.
Washington has since moved towards restricting Chinese robotics technology. In June, the Pentagon added Unitree to a list of Chinese military companies, describing it as a contributor to China’s defence industrial base. The designation falls short of a sanction but limits future US military use of Unitree technology. In July, the Federal Communications Commission also banned imports of future models of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots, including Unitree products.
Experts quoted in the report said such restrictions alone would not create a competitive US robotics industry. Reyk Knuhtsen of SemiAnalysis described the failure to commercialise domestic research as a “dropped ball”, while Vijay Kumar of Penn Engineering argued that the United States needs the capital, industrial base, skilled workforce and supply chains required to scale breakthroughs.
The challenge extends to components. Ghost Robotics, founded by Kenneally and a supplier to US special forces, has produced about 1,000 Vision 60 robots, but they cost upward of $165,000 compared with Unitree’s B series, listed below $100,000 in the US. Some Ghost Robotics components are still sourced from China.
Kenneally said overcoming China’s dominance of the robotics supply chain will require manufacturing capacity in other countries. “We need to work closely with our allies,” he said. “There’s absolutely no path forward without them.”
