Unitree Founder Says Robots Are Headed to Homes — and Today's Hardware Is Like PCs in the 1990s

There’s a recurring analogy making the rounds in robotics circles: the industry right now, with legged robots still figuring out where they fit in the real world, looks a lot like the PC market in the mid-1990s. The hardware worked. The software was catching up. And nobody could quite predict which application would make every home buy one.

Unitree Robotics founder Wang Xingxing became the latest to make this comparison explicit. Speaking at the 2026 Wangfujing Forum in Beijing on July 10, he argued that robots are already moving beyond labs and into everyday life — not just as gadgets, but as platforms, tools, and performers.

Developers and AI researchers are treating Unitree’s robots as programmable hardware. They’re running navigation stacks, training reinforcement learning models, testing manipulation algorithms — all on machines that cost a fraction of what comparable research platforms did five years ago. The company’s quadruped robots, once a YouTube novelty, are now standard equipment in university robotics labs across China and beyond. That’s the PC-era dynamic: ship the hardware, and let the ecosystem build on it.

Wang also sees a role for robots in education. He talked about children getting hands-on experience with the same hardware platforms used in top-tier university research — a possibility that wasn’t realistic when a single robot cost as much as a luxury car. Whether that vision translates into actual classroom products or remains aspirational depends on price and software maturity, but the direction is clear.

Commercial deployments are already happening. Robots are appearing at shopping mall promotions, brand events, exhibitions, and live performances across China. They draw crowds. People queue to interact with them, record videos, and share the experience online. For brands running those events, the return on investment is measurable — foot traffic, dwell time, social media impressions. The emotion-driven engagement isn’t abstract; it’s a business line with real revenue attached.

On the industrial side, Wang’s argument is more familiar. Robots can take over dangerous, repetitive, physically intense work — freeing people for tasks that require judgment and creativity. It’s the same pitch industrial automation has made for decades, but the economics have shifted. Hardware is cheaper. Software is smarter. And robots can now handle manipulation and mobility tasks that previously required a human in the loop.

Unitree has been backing up the rhetoric with real-world moves. The company opened its first physical experience store in Shanghai in May — a flagship showroom where consumers can walk in and interact with the hardware. In recent interviews, Unitree executives emphasized that its supply chain for key components like joint motors is entirely domestic, with upstream suppliers limited to basic raw materials.

The vision Wang laid out isn’t unique. Boston Dynamics, Tesla, and Figure have all staked out similar territory. What sets Unitree apart is cost: the company has been shipping functional legged robots at a fraction of Western prices for years. If the PC analogy holds, Unitree could end up playing the role Compaq did in the 1990s — not the inventor of the category, but the one who made it cheap enough to reach everyone.