Wang Xingxing

Overview

Wang Xingxing is a Chinese robotics entrepreneur, the founder and chief executive of Unitree, a company that builds quadruped (four-legged) robots and humanoid robots. He was born in 1990 in Yuyao, Zhejiang province ^[1].

Education and early research

Wang studied mechanical automation at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University as an undergraduate, and went on to Shanghai University, where he received a master's degree in mechanical engineering in 2015 ^[1].

His involvement with legged machines began before he ran a company. According to China Daily, during his postgraduate study Wang built a robot dog that he called XDog ^[2]. A machine of this kind walks on four legs and has to keep adjusting its joints many times a second to stay upright, which is mechanically harder than a wheeled platform; building one as a student project means working on structure, motors and control software at the same time.

Founding Unitree

After his master's degree, Wang worked at DJI from 2015 ^[1]. He founded Unitree in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, in 2016, and has served as its chief executive since then ^[1][2].

Products

Under Wang, Unitree released the AlienGo quadruped in 2019. In 2020 the company brought out the A1, a machine aimed at education, at a price of 100,000 yuan. The consumer-oriented Go1 followed in June 2021 at 16,000 yuan ^[3]. Read together, the three models trace a move from a research-oriented quadruped toward cheaper machines pitched at classrooms and individual buyers.

The company then moved to two-legged machines. It started developing its first humanoid robot in early 2023 and released the H1 in August 2023; the core team working on it had fewer than 10 engineers ^[3]. Balancing on two legs leaves much less margin for error than standing on four, so a humanoid puts heavier demands on the control software and on the motors that move each joint.

Views on embodied intelligence

Wang has said that the biggest driver of the embodied intelligence industry, and also its biggest source of uncertainty, is AI, and that a real breakthrough could make the sector more than 100 times hotter ^[3]. Embodied intelligence refers to AI that acts through a physical body rather than only producing text or images: the system has to turn a decision into motion in the real world, where surfaces, loads and obstacles keep changing. In that framing, progress in robot hardware alone does not decide how capable the machines become — the software that decides what to do next matters at least as much.

Recognition

In 2023 Wang was named to Fortune China's 40 under 40 business elite list, and he received the China Youth May Fourth Medal ^[1].