中国机器人初创企业智元机器人计划使用国产芯片   2026-07-22

 

Humanoid robots entering a critical mass production stage has created opportunities for China-made chips, so AgiBot has started teaming up with domestic chipmakers and advancing initial cooperation with more than one firm, a senior executive of the startup told Yicai.

AgiBot is using some domestic chips for cerebellar control of its robots, microcontroller units‌ that control joint activity, as well as other communication chips, Wang Chuang told Yicai during the recent World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, without disclosing the name of the chipmaker.

Agilink, a subsidiary of AgiBot focused on developing dexterous hands for humanoid robots, picked Chinese MCUs after considering performance and price, Chief Technology Officer Xiong Kun said to Yicai.

Agilink is using general-purpose MCUs, while also developing some customized chips, Xiong noted, adding that the small device placed on the palm of a dexterous hand can perform movement calculations and sensor information processing.

The next-generation A3 robot developed by Chinese startup TARS will also use domestic chips, co-founder Chen Tongqing told Yicai. "Our core demands for our partners are to have a more powerful edge platform and a team with engineering experience and the ability to cooperate with joint debugging."

TARS raised USD455 million and USD242 million from fundraisers in April and in the second quarter last year, respectively.

The A3 is a wheeled dual-arm robot designed for large-scale production of autos and others. It will use an edge chip that can complete 560 trillion basic operations per second and features large language model inference performance and real-time robot control.

China's Ubtech Robotics, the world's first humanoid robot maker to go public, has set up a joint venture with domestic chipmaker MetaX to focus on research, development, and mass production of smart chips for embodied robots.

MetaX eyes the opportunity brought by the upcoming embodied intelligence industry boom, Senior VP Sun Guoliang told Yicai. "The firm does not develop chips for embodied robots by itself because there are many on-device application scenarios and many types of products, and if it does do it on its own, it will result in additional demand for manpower," so it chose to partner with Ubtech, Sun pointed out.

Chinese robotics companies used to pick Nvidia's chips in their early days, but costs have become an important reason for them to turn to domestic products.

"Many foreign chips are too expensive," said Zhou Jian, chairman of Shenzhen-based Ubtech. "They account for a third of the bill of materials cost of hardware component procurement."

 

来源：Yicai Global

 

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