UBTech Brand Guidelines: Shenzhen’s Alpha, Cruzr and Walker Robot Maker, Listed in 2023

A Shenzhen start-up built on small robots.

UBTech Robotics was founded in Shenzhen, in southern China, in March 2012, according to the company, and its founder and chief executive is Zhou Jian, as the Hong Kong edition of China Daily reported in December 2023. The company styles its own name in capitals, as UBTECH, and trades from the domain ubtrobot.com.

Its first well-known products were small. The company’s own timeline says its Alpha humanoid robot was shown at the China Hi-Tech Fair in 2015, and that 540 Alpha robots performed together at China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala in 2016, a performance registered as a Guinness World Record. Guinness World Records reported in March 2018 that the record for the most robots dancing at once had since been raised to 1,372, at an event organised by the Italian telecoms company TIM in Rome using UBTech’s Alpha 1S, a robot just under 40 cm tall made of aluminium alloy with a plastic coating. Guinness added that UBTech had also built the robots for the first such record, in 2016, and that the Rome attempt was filmed for a television show about a group of robots learning to dance, with an adjudicator discounting any robot that fell.

The small robots fed the larger ones. UBTech says that by 2018 its total production of servo actuators, the compact motors that move a robot’s joints, had reached one million units. In 2017, it says, it launched Cruzr, a wheeled service robot, while its Alpha 2 and Jimu robots received CES Innovation Awards and its education robot, the Alpha 1X, won a New York Design Award. The same timeline places the start of large-scale sales of its education robots in 2019, and lists outside recognition along the way: a place on CB Insights’ AI 100 list of private start-ups in 2017, and selection by MIT Technology Review as one of its 50 Smartest Companies in 2019.

From Walker to the Walker S factory line.

UBTech’s full-size humanoid is Walker. The company says it developed the first generation in 2018 and launched a second in 2019, when six Walker robots performed at the Spring Festival Gala. It developed a new generation, Walker X, in 2021, and that year Walker X and the company’s Panda Robot were shown in the China Pavilion at the World Expo in Dubai, it says.

The industrial line came next. The German technology site heise online reported in January 2025 that UBTech had launched the current Walker S1 in October 2024, had integrated the robot into production at the carmakers BYD and Nio for assembly and quality-control work, and was preparing mass production of the Walker S series by the end of 2025, with a lighter Walker S2 expected in the second quarter of that year. The same report said the logistics company SF Express had tested the Walker S, and that Foxconn had signed an agreement with UBTech on 15 January 2025 for a training project with the Walker S1.

The company’s website now lists the Walker S, S1 and S2 for industrial work, and the Walker C, C1 and X for commercial settings. Alongside the humanoids it sells education kits and platforms such as uKit and UGOT, service robots such as Cruzr, and a consumer range that includes the Alpha Mini and AIRROBO pool cleaners. It describes its own family of AI models under the name Thinker, which it says it uses to give its humanoids the ability to perceive, plan and act.

Robots that walk out of the lab.

Humanoid and legged-robot makers sell machines that most people have only seen on a screen, so video carries much of their identity. Boston Dynamics built a public following through clips of its robots: a 2017 video of the Spot quadruped opening a door for another robot reached the top of YouTube, “Parkour Atlas” followed in 2018, and in 2025 a troupe of robot dogs danced on America’s Got Talent, according to Wikipedia. When Hyundai Motor Group completed its purchase of the company in 2021, its announcement video showed Atlas dancing beside a child, The Robot Report noted.

The newer story is work. Makers now show their robots in factories and warehouses rather than in labs: Agility’s Digit handling totes for the logistics group GXO, and Boston Dynamics’ electric Atlas being trained to sequence car parts at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, as each company describes it. Press releases lean on customer names, pilot sites and hours of operation, and trade reporters such as The Robot Report and IEEE Spectrum follow those claims from launch to deployment.

Launches happen on stages built for that audience. Agility presented a redesigned Digit at ProMat, the material-handling show, in 2023, and Boston Dynamics unveiled its new Atlas at Hyundai’s media day at CES 2026, the companies say. Research conferences such as ICRA, the IEEE’s robotics and automation meeting, and the World Robot Conference in China play the same part for engineers and the trade.

Identities shift as the companies grow up. In March 2026 Agility Robotics became simply Agility, with a refreshed logo that the company said was inspired by the hardware and software it builds, The Robot Report reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, where it builds its robots, and which claims rest only on its own word.

A gong struck by a robot in Hong Kong.

UBTech became a listed company on 29 December 2023, on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. China Daily reported that day that the listing was the year’s last initial public offering in Hong Kong, and that a 170-cm humanoid robot walked to the centre of the stage and struck the gong together with Zhou Jian. The paper wrote that it was the first time investors could trade a Chinese humanoid-robot developer on the secondary market. It added that education and logistics robots had been the company’s main sources of income from 2020 to 2022, and that Zhou planned to target industrial uses, with a new-energy vehicle maker already testing its robots.

That shift is visible in how the company now describes itself. Its website calls UBTech a humanoid robot and smart service robot company, with a mission of “bringing intelligent robots into every family,” and groups its products by setting: industrial, commercial, education and household. Design forms part of the story it tells: it says its robotic industrial design centre was named one of China’s national industrial design centres, in the fifth batch, in 2021.

UBTech is still based in Shenzhen, and English Wikipedia lists Zhou Jian as chief executive.

For a design guide, UBTech shows how a robot maker can grow from small dancing robots to full-size factory humanoids while keeping one product family name, Walker, across every generation. Compare Unitree, another Chinese maker of legged robots, and Agibot, the Shanghai humanoid maker. For this guide we use a deep navy, a clear sky blue and a cool silver grey on white with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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