Quadruped State of The Market - Unitree, Boston Dynamics, ANYbotics, DEEP Robotics, and The Rising Application Ecosystem

Quadrupeds are the most advanced general-purpose robots today. While they don’t grab as many headlines as their Humanoid counterparts, their Level 2 Autonomy coming online opens up a plethora of new market opportunities previously unavailable to robotics. Understanding the Quadrupeds market and ecosystem is important to glimpse the future of autonomous robotics.

Currently, we see two main quadruped hardware providers: the Western pioneer Boston Dynamics and China’s hardware champion Unitree. ANYbotics/DEEP Robotics being notable players that we mention briefly. Raising all providers is a broader startup ecosystem emerging, leveraging new AI model architectures to augment the hardware, and software enabling multiple applications. We discuss these market dynamics, giving a future outlook, as well as new opportunities being unlocked.

We will also analyze detailed Bill of Materials of the Unitree Go2 and B2 including gearboxes, motors, drives, bearings, linkage bar, batteries, LiDAR, foot sensors, optical cameras, SoCs, cameras, and more. The important point here is that their margins are incredible, much higher than most believe. Unitree is not loss leading, they have high volume manufacturing at low cost cracked.

We also provide a framework for the Total Addressable Market (TAM) of the following industries: Oil & Gas, Semiconductor Fabs, and Datacenters. As well as component suppliers exposed to quadrupeds. All extremely topical given the rumored upcoming Unitree IPO and their majority revenue share coming from quadrupeds.

Our Main Takeaways:

• Unitree benefits from a substantial cost advantage relative to Western peers.

• Unitree boasts a much broader product portfolio and faster product release cadence given China’s manufacturing supremacy.

• As hardware providers, Boston Dynamics (and to a lesser extent ANYBotics/DEEP Robotics) has seen Western deployments, benefiting from partial vertical integration.

• Unitree is currently more focused on Chinese industrial deployments, and its security issues pose barriers only in select markets

• However, Unitree has seen meaningful traction in Western research labs/institutes, combining their low-cost hardware and deep development kit with a strong open-source community of researchers.

• The third party application layer ecosystem continues to grow and facilitate quadruped deployments, increasing the capabilities of all quadrupeds.

Why Quadrupeds Dominate Navigation Tasks

While drones, wheeled robots, tracked robots, and more Level 2 Autonomous systems can also operate autonomously, the four-legged quadruped is one of the most flexible and adaptable designs for navigating the world. This opens up a plethora of new roles to be automated.

These cluttered and narrow areas are navigated with the quadruped’s dynamic walking, adjusting ...