Unitree shows humanoid robot lifting a car in rescue demo

Why it matters: Humanoid robots are a fast-moving sector in China, with companies like Unitree drawing global attention for agility demos that often go viral on social media. Such videos are marketing as much as engineering showcases, but they signal how quickly bipedal machines are moving from lab tests toward tasks like security and emergency response.

Unitree Technology released its H2-X humanoid robot on October 21, and a demo video showing the machine lifting a car to rescue someone topped Weibo's trending topics the next day, according to the tech site Kuaikeji.

In the video, the robot steps onto a car roof and flips down, kicks and elbow-strikes doors and hoods until they dent, jumps from a 4-metre platform and rolls back to its feet, and lands repeated flying kicks. It also fends off a knife-wielding attacker and pushes a pedestrian out of the way of a crash.

The H2-X is built on Unitree's H2 platform and stands 1,820mm tall, weighs about 70kg with its battery and has 31 degrees of freedom. Unitree rates its maximum runtime at about eight hours.

Its leg joints deliver up to 360 newton-metres of torque and arm joints 120, with a peak arm payload of about 15kg. The body uses aviation-grade aluminium, titanium alloy and high-strength engineering plastics, and a 2,070 TOPS chip handles onboard computing.

Unitree said last month it had introduced UnifoLM-X2-1.0, a world action model that it said enabled a humanoid robot to spar fully autonomously, without remote control or pre-set scripts. Commenters on Weibo marvelled at the pace of change, with one saying the machines could soon work as security guards.