A leading US distributor of China’s most popular humanoid robots and robot dogs now plans to produce its own robots at a facility on Long Island, New York. The business pivot comes amid the US government’s growing crackdown on foreign-made robots.
The company, RoboStore, had previously become the main North American distributor for humanoid robots and quadruped robots from Unitree Robotics, a Chinese robotics company that produces some of the most affordable and popular humanoid robot models. Universities like Harvard and MIT, along with tech companies like Amazon and Nvidia, purchased such robots made in China through RoboStore for their own research and development purposes.
“We’ve sold over 1,500 robots and deployed them and worked with customers like Cisco, OpenAI, Nvidia, and over 150 universities,” Teddy Haggerty, founder and CEO of RoboStore, told Ars.