China Just Deployed Humanoid Robots to Its Border With Vietnam

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I've already been doing it for five years and I plan on doing it for 10 more and the only way that we can continue doing this is with your support. So one second of your time to hit the subscribe button right now would help this show tremendously. Thank you so much. China is deploying humanoid robots to patrol its border with Vietnam. Ubtech Robotics, one of China's top robot manufacturers, secur a $37 million contract to put its Walker S2 humanoid robots at border crossings in Zhuangi Province. Deliveries began this month. The robots will guide travelers, conduct inspections, manage crowds, and perform logistics work. They stand about 5ft 9in tall, weigh about 95km, walk on two 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 three 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 machines struggle with the chaos of real world border traffic. Now, the contract was signed with the Humanoid Robot center in Fang Changang, a coastal city near the Vietnam border. Ubtech says cumulative orders for its Walker series have reached 1.1 billion yen, around $157 million since shipments began in November. The company plans to deliver 500 industrial humanoid robots by the end of 2025 and scale to 10,000 units annually by 2027. Now this is an aggressive production ramp 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 and 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 degrees of freedom, which means 52 separate joints and axes where it can move. Now the configuration breaks down to six degrees of freedom per leg, two for the waist, seven per arm and two for the head. The waist can rotate 162 degrees in either direction. Its fourth generation dexterous hands have 11 degrees 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. UBTECH says durability testing exceeds 80,000 cycles and the robot can lift up to 15 kg, about 33 pounds 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 miles per hour. 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 stereoscopic vision, giving it human like depth perception. Additional sensors and force feedback systems support balance in dexterous 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 two 48 volt lithium ion battery packs that discharge in parallel when walking. Run time is approximately two hours. When standing or performing tasks stationarily, runtime exceeds to about 4 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 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 three minutes. Now a backup battery Keeps the system running during the swap so the robot knows never fully powers down. It's designed to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, continuous operation. And Ubitech claims the system can achieve over 98% uptime. Most revts 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 Fangching gang border, the Walker S2 units will handle several roles. Some will guide travelers through cues, direct vehicle traffic, and answer 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, it will work in cargo lanes, checking container IDs, confirming seals, and relaying status updates to dispatch centers. The robots will also inspect steel, copper and aluminum facilities nearby, walking structured routs through industrial yards. The key word 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 BrainNet 2.0 combined with a CO agent AI 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, two 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 2.0. So this is an operating system supporting over the air updates. Uch 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. 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 Yuby Tech founder was appointed vice director of that committee alongside leaders from other major robotics companies like Unitree and Agbot. The co founder of Agbot and Wang Xiang Zheng, founder of Unitree also hold 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 Fang Chang Gang project is a public test of whether the technology is ready for regulated high visibility environments. So at the border it's 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. Yubytech operates two dedicated humanoids factories, one in Shenzhen and another in Lizzo. I'm not exactly how to say this but Guangzi, 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 Ubtech aims to reduce unit costs below $20,000 by 2030. That's what Elon Watts the price for a Tesla bot to be the current prices. 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 3. There we go. Adoption could accelerate across everywhere in China. The question is whether ubtech can cut costs while scaling production and maintaining reliability of these robots. Right now yubytech 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 Optimus 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 Optimus 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 and Amazon warehouses. And the difference with UV tech is speed and deployment. While American companies are still running pilots and demonstrations, Yumytech is shipping 500 industrial humanoid robots this year, planning for 10,000 by 2027. If Elon actually ships a million robots in the next five years, yubytech is in trouble. Whether speed translates to reliability remains to be seen with Yubytech, but they are ahead of Tesla right now. So China is being 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 ubtech 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 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 reskilling programs in hybrid models that combine human and robotic labor will be part of the future. This what happens when any industry gets disrupted. What are these reskilling 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 is listening right now and thinks that they're going to be okay, Please think about it again because there's a 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, I mean it 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. A beautiful front end designed in matter of minutes. I actually created one today and I was just goofing off and I created a site that would have taken a team of five to 10 people about five or six 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, 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 inclined. Companies in the U.S. europe and Japan are accelerating development because they're going to fall behind if they don't catch up with China. UV tech'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. Inspections cannot easily stop. 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 and 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 department's got 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 Ubtech Ubtech Walker S2 deployment fails. It'll reinforce 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. Know you just don't know it. Like you 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 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, you already use 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 hit this subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never. And each episode is about 10 minutes to get you caught up quickly. And please, if you support the show even more.com stage zero and please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you tomorrow.