According to IT Home’s news on May 12, the 6th Shanghai Innovation and Entrepreneurship Youth 50 Forum was held on May 10. Wang Xingxing, CEO of Hangzhou Unitree Robotics Co., Ltd., made the latest statement.

Wang Xingxing revealed in his speech that, benefiting from the popularity of the humanoid robot market and national policy attention, the development of humanoid robot enterprises including Unitree is currently in a good state. “Many enterprises’ orders have exceeded expectations.”

Wang Xingxing said that the company’s order demand is very strong this year, and the overall development of the industry is good. The company also benefits from this trend and hopes to do better in product delivery and quality.

Wang Xingxing believes that the hardware problem is the main factor restricting humanoid robots. He predicts that in the next 2-5 years, the key focus of intelligent robot technology will be on the research and development of end-to-end intelligent large models. “The strongest robot company must be the strongest artificial intelligence company.” At the same time, he believes that the industry needs to solve the problem of “how to achieve large-scale manufacturing with lower cost and longer lifespan hardware”.

Wang Xingxing also said that in this era, AI belongs to young people, and there are more opportunities now compared to before. “Whether it’s resources, funds, or the public’s attention to robots and AI, it’s vastly different from what it was 10 years ago. AI is the best opportunity, and everyone can participate.”

Wang Xingxing said that currently, Unitree Robotics is extremely short of staff for all positions, including administrative positions, procurement, sales, technology, research and development, and marketing.

According to the forum information obtained by IT Home, during his postgraduate study at Shanghai University, Wang Xingxing developed a low-cost and high-performance quadruped robot XDog. Later, with the XDog project, he participated in a robotics innovation and entrepreneurship competition in Shanghai in 2015 and won a prize of 80,000 yuan. This funding once became the earliest startup capital for the company.

 ▲ Wang Xingxing in the laboratory during his postgraduate study at Shanghai University, source: Unitree Robotics

In addition, Wang Xingxing also actively talked about “why choose to make humanoid robots” in his speech. He claimed that “first, humanoid robots are the simplest general-purpose robots in structure and have relatively low requirements for hardware; second, humans generally prefer robots that look like humans and can provide emotional value; third, humanoid robots are more convenient for direct data collection, and it is the most convenient to adapt human universal data to humanoid robots; fourth, humanoid robots can handle various things that need to be handled by humans.”