China and the US have focused on the race for humanoid robots. Now China is clear about which ones make money: dogs

It is difficult to talk about all the open fronts that China and the United States have. The technological war covers everything and, if there is a race for artificial intelligencethere is one just as fierce in the field of robotics. The two powers are focusing on the humanoid robots to put them in factories or in customer service, but the market is talking and it turns out that they prefer dogs.

Robot dogs, specifically.

In short. Right now, China is the summit of robotics. Not only because of how advanced their robots are, but because they are already putting them to work. work in factories, stores either museums. They are not theory, they are practice due to government support and, above all, because the components to make a robot are manufactured… in China. This advantage is something that no other country has and that is essential (let them tell the eTSMC’s 60 minutes strategy in Taiwan).

There is multitude of robotics startups and, although the humanoids are the most striking, the robodogs are the ones that make money. In an article by SCMP They explain how quadruped robots are preferred by robotics companies because they are becoming business drivers. AgiBot is one of those companies, and has just expanded its robot portfolio with the creation of a subsidiary -AgiQuad- focused exclusively on quadruped models.

Their justification is that they consider that it is what is going to boost the robotics business and they do not want their robodog to live “in the shadow of a humanoid robot.” That is, instead of launching under the same brand a humanoid robot and a quadruped one and that customers have to choose (and compare), they prefer to ensure that each branch of the business operates a different type of robot.

Projection. AguQuad plans to become a 500 million yuan (about $73 million) business by this year, scaling to 10 billion yuan by 2030 with 300,000 annual robot shipments. At the moment, they say that they have everything sold and that they continue producing units because they are completely out of stock in the warehouse. And they are not the only ones.

Other companies like Amap or the giant Alibaba They want to get into this robot fight to stand up to Unitreebut in the field of four-legged robots. Speaking of the dancing queen, it is estimated that Unitree’s quadruped robot division generated 490 million yuan in revenue in the first three months of 2025 alone. That is, in just three months, it generated as much as what AgiQuad expects to generate this year. Already Deep Robotics He is also doing well in this field.

Deployment. According to IDC analyses, the quadruped robot market generated $180 million in 2024 and is expected to generate $700 million this year. The estimate is that the segment will reach 50,000 million yuan, about 7,329 million dollars.

And the question is… where are these robots going? Many go to exhibitions and fairs in which the robotic muscle of Chinese startups is shown, but there are others that are already operating on the ground. China wants ‘civilian’ quadruped robots, like assistance for blind peoplebut there is also deploying units among firefighters and, as we said a few days ago, within the Chinese army with support, reconnaissance and attack units.

The race doesn’t stop. This scenario makes sense if we take into account several details. The first is the most practical: quadruped robots have years of analysis behind them and have already proven to be very useful in various scenarios. the chinese army He’s not the only one who has them. and, for example, in the United States they are beginning to be deployed in data center surveillance tasks.

And the second reason is because those years of research and development have led to them becoming increasingly cheaper to produce, allowing their manufacturing to scale and leaving more margins for manufacturers. Prices are also falling and it is easier for different actors to integrate them into their workforce.

Precisely for this reason, quadruped robots can be a viable commercial product for those same companies that continue to push the development and commercialization of humanoid robots. The Unitree itself that we talked about before just started to sell its R1 model through AliExpress with a planned launch for the United States, Japan or the United Arab Emirates. Price? $8,200, but you start somewhere.

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