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 U.S. military, according to a former U.S. defence technology official and three top researchers involved in the project.
These robots draw on breakthroughs in quadruped movement financed by the U.S.
DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and other military programmes, the researchers and the former official told Reuters.
He referenced Kenneally’s ARL-funded UPenn paper. Reuters could not establish whether the purchases went ahead. In September 2023, the U.S. In 2024, South Korea’s LIG Defence & Aerospace acquired a 60% stake in Ghost Robotics for $240 million.
In his thesis, Wang explored design tweaks to speed up development, saying his findings could have future “defence, security, family and education” applications. Joao Ramos, who did research at the same time as Katz at the MIT lab, said Unitree copied the Mini Cheetah shape, structure and design. But he credited the company with doing “proper engineering” to perfect a mass-produced robot. Army secured a federal waiver from laws requiring government agencies to prioritise American-made products in order to purchase two Unitree Go2s, according to procurement records that described the devices as crucial tools in the absence of sufficient commercial quantities of U.S.-produced alternatives “of a satisfactory quality”. The only way to escape China’s chokehold on the robotics supply chain, he said, is to secure supplies from other countries that have the manufacturing capacity that the United States lacks. The company is exploring production in Taiwan, Kenneally said.
