Robotics Companies

A robotics company spun out of MIT in 1992, known for legged and humanoid machines such as BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle, and now majority-owned by Hyundai Motor Group.

Mobileye makes camera-based vision chips and software for cars, from basic driver assistance up to systems for driverless vehicles; its EyeQ chips have shipped in hundreds of millions of vehicles.

UBTECH Robotics is a robot company founded in March 2012 that moved from small humanoid robots to full-size industrial humanoids, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2023, and began mass production delivery of its Walker S2 robot in 2025.

Cruise was a San Francisco autonomous-vehicle company founded in 2013 and acquired by General Motors in 2016; it ran paid driverless rides in San Francisco before its permits were suspended and GM wound the business down.

Chinese supplier of advanced driver assistance and automated driving systems for passenger cars, founded in 2015, the largest domestic provider by installation volume, and listed in Hong Kong in 2024.

A Chinese robotics company established in Hangzhou in 2016 that designs and builds quadruped and humanoid robots, selling them at both low starting prices and industrial contract scale.

Aurora Innovation is a self-driving technology company founded in 2017 that went public in 2021 and began regular driverless commercial trucking between Dallas and Houston in April 2025.

Chinese humanoid robotics company founded in February 2023 by Peng Zhihui, a former Huawei "genius youth"; it builds complete robots and their joint modules, and aims to push hardware costs below 200,000 yuan.

Tesla is the American company behind Optimus, a humanoid robot first shown as a concept at its 2021 AI Day; later reports describe pilot production lines, plans for volume manufacturing and a target unit cost below US$20,000.

Figure AI is a Sunnyvale, California company building general-purpose humanoid robots for industrial work, backed by a large investor group and partnered with BMW Manufacturing.

MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted the AI lab that Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy co-founded, which later became CSAIL. The lab also invented Lisp machines, and Minsky co-wrote the book Perceptrons.

Stanford University is a private research university in California, home to the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and the Institute for Human-Centered AI, which publishes the AI Index.

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has one of the earliest US computer science departments. Its researchers built the Logic Theorist, Sphinx speech recognition and the Deep Blue lineage, and won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.

DARPA is the research agency of the United States Department of Defense, created in 1958 in response to Sputnik. It states its mission as creating and preventing technological surprise, and its Grand Challenges brought autonomous vehicle work to a wider community.

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), formed in 2003 by merging the MIT AI Lab with the Laboratory for Computer Science, is the largest laboratory on the MIT campus.

Unimation was the Connecticut company founded in 1961 by George C. Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger that built the first Unimate robot and later the PUMA series.

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, started by John McCarthy in 1963, is associated with the Stanford arm robot design, the Stanley self-driving car and the SAIL programming language.

The Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of Edinburgh, created in October 1966 out of Donald Michie's Experimental Programming Unit, was an early British institutional home for artificial intelligence and a forerunner of the university's School of Informatics.

NVIDIA Research is the research arm of the chipmaker NVIDIA, founded in 2006 with more than 200 scientists. It leads work on AI, self-driving cars, high-performance computing and graphics, and it builds the company's open Nemotron language models.

A department of China's State Council, established in March 2008 to administer industry, communications and informatisation. It consolidated industrial and information-technology functions that had previously been spread across several government bodies.

Zoox is an autonomous ride-hailing company founded in 2014 that builds its own zero-emissions robotaxis, with no steering wheel or pedals, and the software that drives them. It began carrying paying-concept service in Las Vegas after receiving the first commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi.

1X Technologies is the robotics company, founded in 2014 as Halodi Robotics, that builds tendon-driven humanoid robots. In October 2025 it announced NEO, a home humanoid priced at $20,000 or by monthly subscription, with first deliveries planned for 2026.

Li Auto is a Chinese automaker that describes itself as a pioneer in commercialising extended-range electric vehicles in China. It sells extended-range and battery-electric family vehicles and has built a large delivery, retail and charging footprint.

Fourier is a Shanghai robotics company founded in 2015 by Gu Jie. It began with rehabilitation robots and exoskeletons, then released the GR-1, GR-2 and GR-3 full-size humanoid robots in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Momenta is a Chinese "physical AI" company founded in 2016 by Cao Xudong that supplies driving software to carmakers around the world, and it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July 2026.

Apptronik is an Austin robotics company spun out of a University of Texas lab in 2016 that builds the Apollo humanoid robot and has signed commercial deals with Mercedes-Benz and GXO Logistics.

Pony.ai is an autonomous driving company founded in Fremont, California, in late 2016. It runs robotaxi, robotruck and personal-vehicle businesses on a common "virtual driver" system, and operates in both California and China.

Waymo is Alphabet's self-driving technology company, spun out of Google's autonomous car project in December 2016. It builds the software and sensors that drive vehicles rather than the vehicles themselves.

WeRide is an autonomous driving company founded in Silicon Valley in 2017 by Tony Han, formerly chief scientist of Baidu's autonomous driving unit. Its WeRide One platform spans L2 to L4 autonomy, and its vehicles run in more than 60 cities.

Skild AI is a robotics company founded in 2023 that builds a general-purpose robotic foundation model, intended to act as a single brain across many robot bodies and tasks such as manipulation, locomotion and navigation.

SRI International is a non-profit research institute in Menlo Park, California, founded in 1946 as the Stanford Research Institute. Its AI Center built Shakey the robot, and its later work led to Siri.

Rethink Robotics was a Massachusetts robotics company whose humanoid robot Baxter, unveiled in 2012, was designed to work safely alongside people on factory production lines.

Agility Robotics builds Digit, a bipedal mobile manipulation robot, and assembles it at its own factory in Salem, Oregon. The company has tested the robot with Amazon and deployed it with a logistics customer under a multi-year agreement.

The RoboCup Federation runs an international robot-soccer initiative and competition whose stated aim is to develop robotic players able to beat a human World Cup champion team.

The National Development and Reform Commission is a ministerial-level department of China's State Council that drafts and implements economic and social development plans, manages investment and coordinates macro-economic policy. It descends from the State Planning Commission established in 1952.

Toyota Motor Corporation is an automaker that in 2015 announced the Toyota Research Institute, a separate company focused on artificial intelligence and robotics, backed by about $1 billion over five years.

General Motors acquired the self-driving startup Cruise Automation in 2016, then stopped funding its robotaxi work in December 2024 and refocused on hands-free driver assistance such as Super Cruise.

Verne is a Rimac Group company developing an electric two-seater robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals; with Pony.ai and Uber it launched a commercial driverless service in Zagreb in 2026.

Uber ATG was Uber's self-driving unit. After a fatal 2018 crash with a pedestrian that the NTSB traced to a distracted safety operator and weak safety oversight, Uber sold the group to Aurora in December 2020.

Physical Intelligence is a company that develops foundation models and learning algorithms for robots, aiming to bring general-purpose AI into the physical world. It publishes generalist robot policies such as π0 and π0.5, along with open weights and code.

Reka AI is an AI research lab building models and infrastructure for the physical AI era. Its releases include reka-flash-3, a 21-billion-parameter reasoning model, and Reka Edge, a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model designed to run on devices at the edge.

Honda Motor Co., Ltd. is the company that built ASIMO, the humanoid robot it announced in Tokyo on 20 November 2000, following humanoid robotics research that began in 1986 and ran through a series of experimental walking machines.

A Swiss artificial intelligence institute founded in 1988 and now a joint institute of USI and SUPSI, known for LSTM and other neural-network research.

An American robotics company founded in 1990 by three MIT researchers, iRobot built space and military robots before its Roomba vacuum cleaner made it a consumer name; it listed on NASDAQ in 2005 and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2025.

A Chinese consumer electronics and smart manufacturing company built around smartphones, smart hardware and its AIoT platform, listed in Hong Kong in 2018 and extending its engineering into quadruped and humanoid robots.

XPENG is a Chinese maker of smart electric vehicles founded in 2014 and headquartered in Guangzhou, which has extended its in-house AI work to humanoid robots, new driving models and robotaxi plans.

Talen Energy is an independent power producer created in 2015 from the spinoff of PPL's competitive generation business, later taken private by Riverstone, restructured through bankruptcy, and now a nuclear power supplier to Amazon.

Kairos Power, founded in 2016, is an American company developing a fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor using TRISO fuel. It is building the Hermes demonstration reactor in Tennessee and plans 500 MW of projects with Google by 2035.

Covariant is a robotics AI company founded in 2017 by researchers largely from UC Berkeley; in 2024 Amazon hired its founders and took a non-exclusive licence to its robotics foundation models.

Sanctuary AI is a Vancouver-based robotics company founded in 2018 that aims to build human-like intelligence for general-purpose robots. Its humanoid robot Phoenix was named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2023 list, and the company reported its first commercial deployment that year.

American energy company headquartered in Baltimore, one of the largest electricity producers in the United States, known for its 2024 agreement to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1.

Galbot is a robotics company founded in 2023 that builds general-purpose robots around an embodied foundation model, with its AstraBrain model family, a large-scale data infrastructure and deployed robots in several industries.

Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) is an applied AI research institute set up under Zhang Yaqin, targeting the fourth industrial revolution through autonomous driving, AI plus IoT and brain-inspired intelligence.

A British multinational design and engineering firm founded in 1946 by Sir Ove Arup, known for complex landmark projects such as the Sydney Opera House and for ownership held in trust for its employees.