How US military funding propelled China’s robot dogs

US-funded research helped lay the foundation for Unitree’s low-cost robot dogs, while China’s manufacturing ecosystem enabled mass production, challenging US dominance in robotics.

China’s Unitree Robotics – among the world’s biggest producers of humanoid and quadruped robots – based designs for its most successful robot dogs on innovations funded by the US military, according to a former US defence technology official and three top researchers involved in the project.