The spotlight is on China’s robotics sector. It’s mostly directed at humanoids, but what if that’s just a distraction?
The machines that have done the heavy lifting during China’s rapid transformation are far less glamorous. Industrial robotic arms lack the spectacle of humanoids, but they get the job done. Amid the physical AI boom, they’re getting better vision, greater dexterity, and far more intelligence than the robots of yesterday.
Chinese companies are now taking over the sector, scaling at a pace so staggering that it makes the country’s much-hyped humanoid deployments look trivial.
Here’s how China built its advantage while few were paying attention, what other countries are doing to slow its momentum, and what happens next.
The Father of Chinese Robotics
China began developing its first robotic arm in 1979 in response to Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up policies. In the post-Mao era, China’s paramount leader sought to make the country a key player in the global economy by studying and reverse engineering technologies from more advanced industrial nations.
Jiang Xinsong, who’d become known as the Father of Chinese Robotics, led a group of researchers to Japan, which was on the verge of becoming the world’s industrial-robot powerhouse.
The US company Unimation had pioneered the modern industrial robot with its now-iconic Unimate. It became the first machine of its kind to work on an automotive production like when General Motors installed it at its New Jersey plant in 1961. The original Unimate weighed about 1,800 kg (4,000 lbs) and used a powerful hydraulic system to move its arm. Its first job was handling hot diecast metal parts following step-by-step instructions stored in a magnetic drum.
The first Unimate cost about $65,000 to build, but Unimation reportedly sold it to GM for just $18,000 to prove its value. Adjusted for today’s inflation, that would be like paying $200,000 for a $700,000 machine; a $500,000 discount.
Japan adopted the technology aggressively starting in the late 1960s when Kawasaki licensed Unimation’s design to build the country’s first domesteically produced industrial robot. Kawasaki, Fanuc, Yaskawa, and Nachi expanded robot production dramatically while automobile and electronics manufacturers deployed them for welding, material handling, painting, and assembly.
Japan adopted the technology aggressively starting in the late60s when Kawasaki licensed Unimation’s design to build the country’s first domestically produced industrial robot. Kawasaki, Fanuc, Yaskawa, and Nachi expanded robot production dramatically while automobile and electronics manufacturers deployed them for welding, material handling, painting and assembly.
China’s First Industrial Robot
Jiang’s team at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Shenyang Institute of Automation introduced China’s answer to the Unimate in 1982. The five-degree-of-freedom robotic arm, called the SZJ-1, learned through teach and repeat programming.
The electric-hydraulic system, however, was just an experimental machine. Chinese motors, control equipment, precision components, and manufacturing processes were not far along enough to make it as reliable or accurate as established foreign robots.
The next major step came in 1986 when Beijing elevated robotics from research projects into a national priority under its 863 Program. China’s Science and Technology Commission appointed Jiang as the chief scientist for the program’s automation field.
By 1990, Shenyang researchers developed the SZJ-12, described as a general-purpose industrial controller. The team reported success using it with four different robot bodies and said its software adapted to 3-to-7 degrees of freedom for tasks like welding and assembly.
The Birth of Siasun
By the early 1990s, the research moved into the marketplace. But rather than waiting until China could build everything domestically, the institute bought Yaskawa hardware and paired it with its self-developed controllers.
Early customers included automakers like Jinbei Automobile and Shanghai Huizhong. China’s automotive manufacturing boom was in its early stages, creating an enormous market.
In 2000, the Shenyang Institute spun its research into Siasun Robot & Automation, which was named in honor of the robotics pioneer who died three years earlier. Its early product line included the RD120, a 6-axis robot for spot welding in automotive manufacturing; and the RH6, a smaller 6-axis arm for arc welding.
Both of the electric-powered robots were competitive with foreign machines in their basic capabilities like payload and working range, but they still lagged behind industry leaders like ABB and Fanuc on precision and refinement. Siasun was closing the gap, however, and could sell its robots to the Chinese market for 10-to-20 percent less than comparable foreign machines.
The company also inherited the institute’s work on automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and factory logistics. Siasun built robot workstations, automated assembly lines, warehouse and logistics systems, and turnkey automation projects. It began selling internationally just a few years after its launch, exporting AGVs to Mexico, Russia, India, and Italy. Its major breakthrough came in 2007 when it won a contract to supply GM with mobile robots for its factory network across the US, Canada, South Korea, India, South Africa, and other countries.
Siasun became the first Chinese robotics firm to go public when it entered the Shenzhen Stock Market’s ChiNext board in 2010.
China’s Industrial Robot Boom
The Chinese industrial robotics sector became much more competitive in the 2010s. Domestic robot sales jumped from a round 3,100 units in 2012 to 21,000 in 2015. The share belonging to Chinese brands rose from 14 percent to 31 percent.
Several legacy industrial control and automation firms expanded into the fray, including GSK CNC in Guangzhou, Estun Automation in Nanjing, Wuhan Huazhong Numerical Control, and the Shanghai companies STEP Electric Corporation and Triowin Automation. New players like QKM Technology in Dongguan and JAKA Robotics in Shanghai were entering the market as Beijing began pushing to strength China’s domestic robotics sector and to reduce dependance on overseas technology.
The Made in China 2025 plan was announced in May 2015 shortly after the country became the world’s largest buyer of industrial robots. It unleashed a wave of public and private funding into robotics as a new breed of startups emerged.
Cobot Era
While older companies released traditional robotic arms that complemented their existing automation systems, newer players focused heavily on collaborative robots, or cobots, which were having a moment globally.
The Danish company Universal Robots introduced the first commercially successful cobot, the UR5, in 2008. The 6-DoF arm could handle 6 kg (11 lbs), designed for smaller businesses who found traditional industrial arms too heavy and complicated.
Cobots opened automation to a much larger population since small and midsized outfits vastly outnumber major manufacturers. The products that hit the market in the 2010s relied on torque, force, position, and velocity sensing and safety-rated control systems to detect contact and limit potentially dangerous motions around people.
Chinese Cobot Takeover
In Shenzhen, Dobot launched its first product, a lightweight robotic arm, through crowdfunding in 2015. Its Kickstarter campaign raised more than $615,600 against an initial goal of just $36,000. The original Dobot had a 4-axis design and weighed just 3 kg (6.6 lbs). Built from aluminum alloy and ABS plastic, it was optimized for desktop tasks. Users could swap its end tools to turn the arm into a 3D printer, a laser engraver, a drawing machine, or a robotic gripper. Its launch video also showed it control via a brain-computer interface (BCI).
It cost around $500 during crowdfunding, but Dobot moved upmarket in the following years with robots for increasingly serious factory work. They continued marketing their products as cobots because they’re meant to work in close proximity to people rather than inside work cells like conventional industrial robotic systems.
Also in Shenzhen, Han’s Robot emerged out of Han’s Laser, a major manufacturer of industrial laser processing equipment. Its first-generation Elfin collaborative robot hit the market in 2016 before the company was formally established. Like Dobot, Han’s later expanded into more advanced collaborative machines. The company is now known as Huayuan Robotics.
In Beijing, AUBO Robotics launched in 2015 after years of R&D that began at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Its flagship offering was the AUBO i5, which had very similar specs and capabilities as the UR5 from Universal Robots.
Another Beijing startup, ROKAE Robotics, took a different approach, developing high-performance 6-axis industrial arms using its own control technology. Its early XB Series products targeted jobs like machining, assembly, handling, and automotive parts production. ROKAE later expanded into collaborative robots with its XMate family.
In Suzhou, Elite Robots also initially focused on traditional industrial robots and motion controllers when it launched in early 2016. However, the company rapidly shifted toward the cobot market with its EC Series.
Chinese brands have rapidly strengthened their grip on the collaborative robot market. They went from selling fewer than 1,000 units in 2015 to around 50,000 in 2025. Chinese companies control more than 90 percent of the market domestically and now account for more than 60 percent of cobot shipments worldwide.
Teradyne vs. China
The growth has eroded Universal Robots’ lead. It’s gone from owning more than half the market in 2016 to around 15 percent today, though it sells more units than ever. In 2025, Dobot reported that it had overtaken Universal Robots and its other rivals to become the world’s top cobot manufacturer by annual shipments.
Teradyne Robotics Group, the Massachusetts-based parent company of Universal Robots, has begun taking legal action against Chinese rivals.
“Both automation and innovation are critical to Europe’s future,” Teradyne President Jean-Pierre Hathout said in a press release. “We will not allow the products of companies that unlawfully copy protected technologies to compromise customer experience, the intellectual property of our technology sector or Europe’s industrial future.”
In February 2026, it sued Elite Robots in Germany over alleged software copyright infringement and won a preliminary injunction restricting sales of affected products. The Regional Court of Hamburg issued a preliminary injunction preventing Elite Robots Germany from distributing related products while the case is pending.
Teradyne followed that suit in August 2026 with another case against JAKA Robotics at Europe’s Unified Patent Court in Copenhagen. This time, Teradyne alleged that JAKA’s cobots infringed on patents covering both hardware and software. A decision in Teradyne’s favor could block JAKA’s sales across most of the EU as well as the UK.
China’s Industrial Robot Installations
China has rapidly widened its lead in industrial robot installations since they grew by 44 percent in 2021.
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), Chinese factories installed more than 345,000 robots in 2025, accounting for nearly 60 percent of industrial robot installs worldwide. In the same year, the US installed around 39,000, Japan about 36,000, and South Korea about 30,000. That means China installed about 9x as many robots as the US and 10x as Japan, the onetime undisputed leader in industrial robotics.
Chinese manufacturers are also taking over market share domestically, though at a slower rate than cobots. In 2015, Chinese companies supplied about 31 percent of industrial robots installed on the mainland. Their share fell to 22 percent in 2017 as the country’s robot boom initially benefited foreign companies, but then it recovered to 30 percent in 2020 and kept rising. Twenty-twenty four was the first year that Chinese industrial robot makers outsold foreign suppliers with 57 percent of the market share, up 10 percent from the prior year.
Complicating the figures is KUKA. Though the longtime industrial robotics leader is considered German, it’s been controlled by the Chinese appliance giant Midea Group since 2017 and became fully Chinese-owned in 2022.
China’s indigenous conventional industrial robot brands are starting to dominate the mainland, but they still have relatively modest markets share everywhere else. A November 2025 report by the US China Economic Security Review Commission estimated that Chinese suppliers make up less than 2 percent of the global industrial robot market by value.
The Trump Administration has made protecting America’s robotics sector a national security priority. The FCC recently enacted restrictions on foreign-made imports, but they only apply to mobile machines like humanoids, quadrupeds, wheeled service bots, and robotic vacuums.
Evan Beard, the CEO of the New York startup Standard Bots, has called for the US to ban fixed industrial robot imports as well, saying they pose the same risks to national security. The restrictions could very well happen since the Commerce Department has indicated it’s investigating whether foreign industrial machinery poses risks.
Impact on Humanoids
Back in China, conventional industrial robots and cobots are integral to a slew of highly automated humanoid robot factories now coming online. They can be seen in footage from companies like UBTECH Robotics, which just opened its new mega factory in Liuzhou that can reportedly churn out a fake human every 10 minutes at full speed.
Humanoid companies in China and the West often show footage of their robots helping assemble fellow humanlike robots. But for now, that’s mostly for demo purposes. Though humanoids are taking on more industrial tasks like material handling, most of the serious factory automation still relies on industrial robotic arms and specialized machines that manufacturers have spent decades perfecting.
Many of China’s robotic arm makers started developing their own humanoids after Beijing set a national goal in 2023 to lead th market by 2027.
Estun, China’s top industrial robot maker, is building on its decades of experience in industrial automation with its Codroid series of humanoids. Its latest iteration, the Codroid 02, stands about 170 cm (5 feet 7 inches), weighs around 70 kg (154 lbs), and is built for jobs like material handling, assembly, and inspections.
Beijing-based ROKAE, which raised more than $110 million over the summer entering the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX), is developing a biped named HumanX and a wheeled humanoid-style platform called Helois. JAKA Robotics, which is reportedly pursuing a HKEX public listing, showcased its compact humanoid for research named π during the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing.
And China’s OG robot maker, Siasun, has entered the humanoid race with a lineup of wheeled and walking dual-armed robot workers. Its flagship humanoid is Songxing, which stands 176 cm (5 feet 9 inches) and boasts a reported 42 DoF. Pricing is not available.
Among China’s established industrial robotics firms, Dobot appears the furthest along in commercializing humanoids. Its flagship humanoid Atom, which is priced starting around $27,000, entered mass production in 2025 and has been delivered to customers like Aska Corporation, a Japanese automotive production equipment and systems integration firm. Dobot has also developed a wheeled version of Atom for faster factory deployments and a compact humanoid aimed at consumers named Lumo.
The convergence is also happening from the other direction.
During the 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing, Shenzhen-based X Square Robot showed off its Wall-B physical AI model using a pair of its new 6-axis robotic arms. During a 5-hour livestream, they successfully processed 10,000 mixed parcels, including soft packages and irregular shapes, averaging a little over 1,900 parcels per hour at 1.88 seconds each.
Hangzhou-based Unitree, which became famous for its agile quadrupeds and humanoids, now sells a family of standalone robotic arms.
The future of factory automation may not mean humanoids everywhere. Instead, conventional robotic systems could gain humanlike abilities with next-gen end effectors that are quickly approaching the dexterity of human hands.
Some companies are already taking this idea much further. Shenzhen-based LimX Dynamics recently showed what happens when humanoid tech is combined with the scale and strength of old-school industrial robotics. Working with the US companies ZINOVA and RIC Robotics, LimX integrated a pair of its modular Tron 2 dual-arm upper bodies with what looks like KUKA arms for complex construction workflows. Read more about LimX’s plans for a post-cyberpunk future here.