Unitree As2-W
unitree.com
unitree.com
Just like in a year or two you will start to see more appendages than just two arms on humanoids.
A hub motor for each leg adds some weight, but you get a rolling mode on flat terrain with great range.
At the same time you keep obstacle climbing mode with stationary wheels, and can use the leg actuators as shock absorbers and obstacle avoidance on a bumpy path. Best of both worlds, with a new software challenge.
Literally we have a very old saying that is "don't reinvent the wheel" and yet people persist in doing so, when an already near optimal design exists.
I'm not saying don't do anything new and novel but that if a large portion of the design has already been done for you and you can improve it, like this company has done (wheels on the end of legs!), why not try that first and see if it works before starting over.
If it were possible to make legged robots with the same fine motor control and dexterity as human legs, let alone four-legged animals' legs, we'd be way ahead of where we are right now in mobile robotics. We can't.
relevant link.
I remember watching this video with the takeaway: if you want it secure, build it yourself... which is what I am currently doing.
1. We need the capability to build the servos, actuators, etc. Supply chain, factories, specialized vendors.
2. We need to dump the firmware, decompile it, extract the models, and liberate it all. AI will help immensely with that. We can literally hijack everything software that isn't delivered over cloud now - so this is the easy part. We can then fine tune, adapt to new tasks, etc. Grabbing the brain = easy.
So the hard part is the hardware itself. The brain will belong to us soon enough.
Robotics distillation will be a big thing. You won't even have to farm out billions of requests across residential gateways. You just need to buy one unit.
You can't stop the software from becoming open.
Startup idea: AI model to dump the firmware from DJI, Unitree, etc. etc. and turn it into human-readable code. Broad utility across every industry with tons of willing buyers.
Hardware, though. We need that part.
Security review, checking for bugs or spyware, repairing your own hardware you own, modifying your own hardware you own, measuring performance, ...
It's legitimate as hell.
This is one of the superpowers of LLMs and generative AI I think, providing cheap reverse engineering superpowers to clean room reimplement proprietary and closed systems as open source systems. Fiat, tokens, and context goes in, technology sovereignty comes out. In the same way people talk about a software factory, think about a reverse engineering factory. You are laundering the knowledge and tradecraft embodied in artifacts, both digital and physical, through model training and inference.
Open hardware developed by the above process can be produced by contract hardware manufacturers or someone CrowdSupply facilitates. If an expert opinion is needed on this, I’d recommend Andrew Huang of bunnie studios.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/cheap-reverse-engineer...
https://www.bunniestudios.com/
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(think in systems)
The other half is yes, of course, any company will fake it till they make it.
But Unitree is definitely making robots.
unitree has done this consistently.
Not doing acrobatics like the marketing video of course, just doing mundane things like going from point A to point B.
And then a tiny little one on the bum like a cutesy tail <3
>> High Payload:
>> Static 150 kg;
>> Continuous walking payload approx. 16 kg
And on top of that:
>> Long Endurance:
>> Unloaded 3h+ (>33 km);
>> Loaded > 2h (>16 km)
16 kgs for two hours max is not "extremely valuable to any military". It's hardly even valuable to a leisure camper. You might be able to get this to carry some of your stuff if you go on a short hike, but if you were thinking of going camping and having it carry your camping gear, you can forget about it.
There's already plenty of systems like that, e.g. Ukraine's TW 12.7 [1] or even the MAUL used in rescue missions [2].
What is the niche targeted by Unitree with this robot? What are they selling, exactly; and to whom?
It's worth asking those questions if one wants to go beyond the excitement of watching a cool demo, and towards understanding the state of the art in robotics. Lots of cool videos of robots doing all sorts of impressive stuff around, but those are heavily edited and carefully curated to show what the vendor wants to show. The question is how much of that ends up in use in real-world situations, from homes, to roads to battlefields. The answer usually is: very little.
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[1] https://theconversation.com/ukraines-killer-robots-show-how-...
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/11/17/robot-coff...
There's a video where it's going uphill over uneven terrain with a load at a much slower pace, which is the same as what Big Dog could do 21 years ago, and another one where it's shown rolling up a smooth, grassy slope while loaded, which is pretty meh.
And that's just carrying a load. Now, you want it to carry an assault rifle and fire it? Like, at enemy targets? And hit them?
You will need to wait for a couple of major breakthroughs in robotics and AI still, I'm afraid.
On the other side: Years of VC focusing on the next great app to make you some cooked eggs instead of investing in companies operating in the physical world.
1. how could they steal something that western companies dont even have yet?
2. for more fundamental stuff, western companies did transfer knowledge themselves by moving factories to China, in exchange for decades of access to China market and exorbitant profits they earned. Where exactly is "supposed stealing" in unitree ?
It's basically the patent problem.
To my knowledge, China has never been caught infringing on US patents on US soil. A lot of Chinese innovations are simply orders of magnitude better than any US alternative, for example TikTok's algorithm and TikTok as a short-video social network.
So please answer my question, how could China steal anything that either 1) Western companies explicitly granted as part of Joint Venture corporation, 2) Western companies havent even developed themselves, and at best, only possess inferior version, generation or two behind the state of the art?
in IP realm, India for example forcefully nationalizes all pharmaceutical IP and produces generics of brand name drugs for its internal market (1970 Patents Act)
(Im basically rewording my original comment, you didn't get my point the first time)
Even if the AS2-W isn't capable of doing that today, it's a fairly obvious goal for future development given how generally useful wheels are otherwise.
its either rolls perfectly without traction or walks uphill with perfect traction ?
is it AI generated video or did they make some groundbreaking success ?
or is it just promo video, showing future potential, not yet developed capabilities ?