Insight: How US military funding propelled China’s robot dogs

China’s Unitree Robotics – the world's biggest producer of humanoid and canine robots – based designs for its most successful four-legged machines on innovations funded by the U.S. military, according to three top robotics researchers and a former U.S. defense technology official. Unitree’s $1,600 Go2 model, launched in 2023, helped the company rapidly dominate the global quadruped robot market. The firm’s imminent Shanghai stock market debut has drawn frenzied demand. The success of these robots draws on breakthroughs in quadruped movement financed by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and other military programs, the researchers and the former official told Reuters.“These principles were put to work and then scaled in an exceptional way using amazing manufacturing and supply chain technology to where now you see companies like Unitree and other companies in China are shipping way more legged robots than American companies are," said Gavin Kenneally, a former University of Pennsylvania researcher involved in the program.