China’s latest humanlike robot has skin that can feel and think.
That’s according to Matrix Robotics, a Shanghai startup led by Zhang Haixing (Allen Zhang), a former Tesla China engineer who played a major role in the EV maker’s Optimus humanoid project. The two-year-old robotics firm, officially registered as Matrix Superintelligent System Integration Co., just unveiled the mass-production-ready iteration of its flagship humanoid robot, the Matrix-3.
Standing 170 cm (5 feet 7 inches), the biped robot weighs around 65 kg (143 lbs). It’s covered in 3D woven biomimetic skin with embedded tactile sensors that’s sensitive to pressures as light as a gentle fingertip touch. Its aesthetics are similar to Silicon Valley-based Figure AI‘s flagship humanoid, the Figure 03.
The humanoid’s five-fingered hands have a reported 27 degrees of freedom (DoF), which puts it in the upper echelon of dexterous end effectors hitting the market today. It has a tendon-driven design that’s inspired by human anatomy. On paper, its dexterity is comparable to a human hand, which typically has around 27 DoF.
The robot runs on Matrix’s self-developed physical AI model called WAVE. The startup says the system enables zero-shot generalization so the Matrix 3 humanoid can understand basic physical principles, interpret natural-language instructions, plan actions, and adapt to novel tasks in unstructured environments without extensive finetuning. The artificial intelligence combines input from the humanoid’s cameras with thousands of tiny sensors across its e-skin and fingertips.
Matrix Robotics plans to start large-scale manufacturing in the second half of 2026 at its new Shanghai factory with a planned annual capacity of 10,000 units. The Matrix-3’s pricing starts around $100,000.