Spot-Like Robot Dog Does 'Yoga'

Based in Hangzhou, outside Shanghai, Unitree Robotics was founded in 2017 by Xing Wang with the mission of making legged robots as popular and affordable as smartphones and drones are today. In a showcase of the heavily Boston Dynamics-inspired company's recent progress, it has released a video showing its four-legged robot A1 balancing in a yoga-like pose. "Marc Raibert … is my idol," Wang once told IEEE Spectrum about the president and founder of Boston Dynamics. While the famous robotics company serves as inspiration for Unitree Robotics, the Chinese company wants to make "make quadruped robots simpler and smaller, so that they can help ordinary people with things like carrying objects or as companions," Wang told IEE Spectrum. In order to instill this accessibility into their A1 robot, Unitree Robotics, made it weigh only 12 kg -- just under half the weight of Boston Dynamics' Spot robot, which weighs 25 kg.