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Thank you so much. China is deploying humanoid
robots to patrol its border with Vietnam.
UB Tech Robotics, one of China's top robot manufacturers, secured
a $37 million contract to put its Walker S2 humanoid robots
and border crossings in Xuanxi province.
Deliveries began this month. The robots will guide
travellers, conduct inspections, manage crowds and perform
logistics work. They stand about 5 feet 9 inches
tall, weigh about 95 kilometers, walk on 2 legs like us, and can
work continuously because they swap their own batteries without
human help. That last detail is super wild.
A robot that changes its own power source in about 3 minutes
and never needs to stop. We don't need Border Patrol
agents anymore, right? The question is whether this is
a glimpse of the future or a high profile experiment that
will quietly fade when the machine struggle with the chaos
of real world border traffic now.
The contract was signed with the Humanoid Robot Center in Feng
Cheng Gang, the coastal city near the Vietnam border.
UB Tech says cumulative orders for its Walker series have
reached ¥1.1 billion, around $157 million since shipments
began in November. Company plans to deliver 500
industrial humanoid robots by the end of 2025 and scale the
10,000 units annually by 2027. Now, this is an aggressive
production ramp. We're going to walk through what
these robots actually do, how the battery swap system works
and what it means for workers, and where China's humanoid
ambitions fit in the global race against Tesla.
Figure in other competitors and we'll get right into that after
this very short break. Now, the Walker S2 is built for
industrial work, not showroom demos.
It's not run by people. It has 90 or 52° of freedom,
which means 52 separate joints and axes where it can move.
Now the configuration breaks down to 6° of freedom per leg, 2
for the waist, 7 per arm, and two for the head.
The waist can rotate 162° in either direction.
It's 4th generation dexterous hands have 11° of freedom reach
and enabling fine manipulation like grasping objects or
checking seals on cargo containers.
The hands are designed like human like dimensions and can
perform sub millimeter precision operations.
UV Tech says durability testing exceeds 80,000 cycles and the
robot can lift up to 15 kilograms, about £33 per arm,
across a workspace stretching from ground level to 1.8 meters
high. Torque waist joints let it squat
deep and stoop for tasks near the ground.
It can walk around 4.5 mph, and that's a brisk walking pace for
a human. For a bipedal robot carrying
loads in a crowded environment, that is ambitious engineering
and the body is constructed from aerospace grade aluminum alloy
and carbon fiber reinforced polymer.
The bionic arms feature a hollow structure with integrated wiring
which enables complex coordinated movements like the
autonomous battery swap and the robot uses dual RGB cameras at
its head for a stereoscopic vision giving it human like
depth perception. Additional sensors and force
feedback system support balance in dextrous manipulation, and
full body dynamic balancing algorithms keep the robot stable
during movement, even when carrying heavy loads or even
navigating uneven surfaces. Whether all of this actually
works reliably outside of controlled factory conditions is
a very open question in the feature drawing the most
attention for me is the battery swap.
The Walker S2 uses 248 Volt lithium ion battery packs that
discharge in parallel. When walking, runtime is
approximately 2 hours. When standing or performing
tasks stationarily, runtime exceeds to about four plus hours
a recharge. A full recharge without the
battery swap takes about 90 minutes.
But instead of waiting for the charge, the robot navigates on
its own to a swap station. It removes the depleted battery
with its own hands, place it is places it in a charger, then it
grabs another battery with whatever power it has in its
body and it installs it. The whole process takes around 3
minutes now. A backup battery keeps the
system running during the swap, so the robot never fully powers
down. It's designed to run 24 hours a
day, seven days a week continuous operation, and Ubitec
claims the system can achieve over 98% uptime.
Most rabbits require scheduled downtime for charging.
This one does not. It just swaps the battery out.
And now border crossings don't pause at night either.
You know the robots will not pause for anything now.
Now at the fencing gang border, the Walk Arrest 2 units will
handle several roles. Some will guide travelers
through queues, direct vehicle traffic and ansic basic
questions. Think a bit like an airport
information kiosk, except it walks around and it actually
talks to you. And other robots will patrol
corridors and waiting areas, watching for blocked exits or
crowd patterns that might need human intervention.
A third group will work in cargo lanes, checking container IDs,
confirming seals and relaying status updates to dispatch
centers. And the robots will also inspect
steel, copper and aluminum facilities nearby, walking
structured routes through industrial yards.
The keyword in all of this is support.
These machines are helpers. They're here to help people
along. They don't make any decisions.
And the humans still run the whole border.
Now Ubtech says it's Walker S2 uses something called brain net
two point O combined with a Co agent EI framework.
Those are internal names for systems that handle multimodal
reasoning, task planning, and autonomous exception handling.
So to break it down, the robot can perceive its environment
through cameras similar to Tesla, plan a sequence of steps
to complete a task and adjust when something unexpected
happens. It uses binocular stereo Vision
2 cameras working together like human eyes to judge depth and
distance. This is how it navigates factory
floors and crowded border halls without bumping into people or
tripping over your luggage. Dynamic balancing algorithms
keep it stable during movement in case it does trip even when
carrying heavy loads. And the system runs on Ubuntu
with Rosa 2 point O. So this is an operating system
supporting over the air updates. UB Tech says the AI continuously
optimizes using billions of data points accumulated from
industrial training. This might be the year of the
Linux of Linux here with Ubuntu in these robots.
I mean, the the Linux desktop may be coming in robot form.
Whether all of this works reliably in this messy world of
humans, that's an open question now.
This deployment fits a broader national strategy out In 2023,
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued
guidance calling for a national innovation system around human
robots. By 2025, the ministry opened
consultation on a Standardization Committee, an
expert group that writes industry rules for humanoid
robots. Now the UB Tech founder was
appointed vice director of that committee, alongside leaders
from other major robotics companies like Unit Tree and
Agbot. The Co founder of Agbot and Wang
Zhengzheng, founder of Unit Tree, also holds seats.
That means the companies building these robots are also
helping write the standards they must meet.
Imagine that Chinese officials treat humanoid robots as a
strategic industry. The Feng Chang Gang project is a
public test of whether the technology is ready for
regulated high visibility environments.
So at the border is very strict. There are certain rules you have
to abide by and there are certain lanes that people have
to go in. There's certain things that are
happening now in a busy city street, things are completely
different. Things are wild.
And this is a test to see how these robots do in human
environments where there's a little bit of commotion, but not
like a city, you know? So the scale of chain is
humanoid robot push is significant.
UB Tech operates 2 dedicated humanoid factories, one in
Shenzheng and another in Lezhou. I'm not exactly how to say this,
but Guangzhi, the company says it has full stack capabilities,
meaning it handles everything, research, manufacturing and
sales all in one place so they don't outsource things.
Chief Branding Officer Michael Tam told the South China Morning
Post that UB Tech aims to reduce unit costs below $20,000 by
2030. That's what Elon Watts, the
price for a Tesla about to be the current price is.
It's well over $100,000 per unit today if humanoid robots cost as
much as mid range cars instead of a luxury vehicle like a model
S3 or a model. S sorry.
Or I was thinking of a model 3, but a Model S and it can bring
it down to less than a model three.
There we go. Adoption could accelerate across
everywhere in China. The question is whether UB tech
can cut costs while scaling production and maintaining
reliability of these robots. Right now Ubi tech isn't
profitable. Even as orders grow, the company
remains loss making. So it's like the old tech
startup deal. You build something until you
figure out a way to make money, right?
You just ramp and ramp and ramp. And the global competition is
heating up, of course. Tesla's Optimist humanoid robot
has been in development for a few years now.
Since 2021, Elon Musk has said that Tesla could produce
millions of units, and that Optimist could eventually become
the company's most valuable product.
And he wants to start making millions of these things in a
few years. Figure AI raised over $600
million in 2024 and has partnered with BMW to deploy
robots in manufacturing. Boston Dynamics continues to
refine Atlas. Agility Robotics is testing its
Digit robot in Amazon warehouses.
And the difference with Ubitec is speed and deployment.
While American companies are still running pilots and
demonstrations, Ubitec is shipping 500 industrial humanoid
robots this year. It planning for 10,000 by 2027.
If Elon actually ships a million robots in the next 5 years, UB
tech is in trouble. Whether speed translates to
reliability remains to be seen with UB tech, but they are ahead
of Tesla right now. So China is beating America in
this and the implications for workers are in peril.
Border crossings employ a lot of people, thousands of people.
Automations that handle crowd management, logistics and
routine inspections could either get these people laid off or
fired, or just shift their job responsibilities to something
else. And Ubi tech frames the robots
as helpers. That human staff could be freed
up for more higher level work. Now there could be job
displacement. Surveillance is a problem, and
accountability when machines make those mistakes.
Like who's in charge? The significant change is
continuous operation. There's no downtime.
Machines that work non-stop raise questions about what
happens to the workers who used to cover the night shifts.
Those are the people that were doing the hard work.
You do the night shift, you start late, you end early in the
morning, sleep all day, do it again.
But what are you going to do? Because those shifts are going
to be taken over by a robot. There aren't that many nice
shifts anymore. Now, rescaling programs in
hybrid models that combine human and robotic labor will be part
of the future. That's what happens when any
industry gets disrupted. What are these rescaling
programs? How can you make yourself
valuable? Anybody that's in a program
right now that you know that you do very minimal physical labor
but also very minimal mind labor, you will eventually be
replaced by a robot. The AI is coming for your jobs,
and I'm not joking. I think it's true.
The way that these robotics companies are getting funded is
like early stage web companies when I was around at the
beginning of the Internet and all of our companies got funded
out the roof. I have sold numerous companies
to other startups and they just scooped us all up because it was
just you get all the information you can, get all the data you
can and get all those people that are talented into your crew
and then you get rid of the people that aren't doing the
high value tasks. So anybody that's listening
right now and thinks that they're going to be OK, please
think about it again because there's the way that they will
be able to replace you with a robot or with some AI.
Most of the front end web development jobs that were low
end, even that, I mean, it's just that was my old industry,
front end web development. I do video production now for
social media and marketing and all the front end developers
that I know, if they're not senior level, are in real rough
shape. They have gotten their jobs
taken away. AI can create a website for you.
Front end, beautiful front end designed in matter of minutes.
I actually created 1 today, and I was just goofing off, and I
created a site that would have taken a team of five to 10
people about 5 or 6 months five years ago, and I did it within
minutes. So the technology is going to
replace you. Now.
If this pilot succeeds, similar deployments could be at
airports, seaports or train stations across China.
So next time you travel to China, watch out for these
robots. Other countries are going to be
next. The global market for humanoid
robots in industrial and public service applications is
projected to grow rapidly through the end of the decade.
So if you want a stable job in the future, get into robotics if
you're technically a client. Companies in the US, Europe and
Japan are accelerating development because they're
going to fall behind if they don't catch up with China.
Ubitec's Walker S2 deployment is a transition from controlled
factory environments to unpredictable field operations.
Border crossings are crowded, noisy, and full of unexpected
weird people. Schedules are tight in
inspections cannot easily stop. You got to keep going if the
robots handle that environment reliably.
If they can figure this out, it'll strengthen the case for
humanoid robots in other complex public settings like police,
public service, things like that.
Fire departments can be replaced too, by robots.
Why would you, why would you risk a person when you can have
a robot? And I know it's a, it's a long
shot here. Why would you hurt a person when
a robot could do the job and not worry about getting, you know,
killed on the job? It's just a no brainer.
Fire departments are going to be replaced by robots police, some,
I think crowd control type stuff, yes, but other police
know. But yeah, I think it's going to
be a matter of time, You know, like taxi drivers, of course
they're they're going to be replaced by by robot cars.
It's going to be it's going to be all over the place.
But now if this fails, the Ubtec, Ubtec Walker S2
deployment fails, it'll reinforced the fact that there's
still a gap between demos and real world performance because
real world performance right now is in a very small sections of
warehouses in manufacturing facilities.
There aren't that many that are performing in public right now
without people behind the behind the the glass controlling them.
So either way, this is a huge moment for the robotics
industry, and it's going to change how things are perceived
in the future. I think robots are cool.
I think they have a place. We already have robots all over
the place, you know, you just don't know it.
Like your kiosk when you order food, someplace like that's a
robot. It's all a robot.
They're not humanoid robots, mind you.
But everything you're using right now, your phone, it's a
little robot. Your computer, it's kind of a
robot, but anything with mechanical parts and some AI in
it, think of that as you know, he already used this technology.
Anything that you interact with in real life with your body and
your hands. Maybe it doesn't walk, maybe it
doesn't talk, maybe it doesn't hand you things or have hands,
But we're already interacting with some of this technology is
just going to develop into something that's going to be
more humanoid in the future. So my warning to you is to be
careful with your jobs because you could get them taken by a
humanoid robot in the next five years or before, depending on if
there's a big breakthrough. Hey, thank you so much for
listening today. I really do appreciate your
support. If you could take a second and
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