Cyan Robotics
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Last reviewed
May 9, 2026
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7 citations
Review status
Source-backed
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v4 · 2,095 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
| Cyan Robotics | |
|---|---|
| General information | |
| Full name | Cyanborg Robotics Co., Ltd. |
| Registered name | Shanghai Qingxin Yichuang Technology Company |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Founder | Niu Tengdi |
| Headquarters | Caohejing Hi-Tech Park, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China |
| Industry | Robotics, Humanoid robots |
| Products | ORCA 1 humanoid robot |
| Design partner | TEAMS Design Shanghai |
| Sales channel | JD.com |
| Website | cyanborg.com |
Cyan Robotics (legally registered as Cyanborg Robotics Co., Ltd. and operating in China as Shanghai Qingxin Yichuang Technology Company) is a Chinese robotics startup based in Shanghai that develops modular full-size humanoid robots focused on approachable human-robot interaction. The company is best known for the ORCA 1, a bipedal humanoid that walks with what Cyan calls an emotional gait, adjusting its walking style to match different situational moods. Founded in 2023 by former Toyota and Huawei autonomous driving researcher Niu Tengdi, Cyan moved from launch to a finished product in roughly a year, debuting Orca 1 in October 2024 and selling units through JD.com at prices between $40,000 and $50,000.[1][2][3]
Cyan operates inside the Humanoid Robot Innovation Incubator at Caohejing Hi-Tech Park in Shanghai's Xuhui District. The incubator provides lab space, testing facilities, and access to the regional robotics supply chain. The company maintains what it describes as a full-stack in-house capability covering hardware, motion control, decision making, dual-arm manipulation, data systems, and human-machine interaction.[3][4]
Cyan was founded in 2023 in Shanghai. Its founder, Niu Tengdi, is a former autonomous driving researcher who previously worked at Toyota and Huawei. The company was registered as Shanghai Qingxin Yichuang Technology Company, with Cyanborg Robotics Co., Ltd. used as the international corporate identity. Cyan launched shortly after the Chinese government announced national targets to mass produce humanoid robots by 2025 and to lead the global humanoid market by 2027. The startup chose Shanghai's Humanoid Robot Innovation Incubator at Caohejing Hi-Tech Park as its base of operations. The Xuhui District ecosystem hosted more than 370 large language model enterprises and reached close to 100 billion yuan in artificial intelligence industry output by 2024, giving Cyan access to nearby talent, supply chains, and testing partners.[1][3][4]
For the industrial design of its first humanoid, Cyan partnered with TEAMS Design Shanghai, the Chinese studio of the international TEAMS Design firm. The collaboration produced a robot with rounded body forms, a black, white, and gray color palette, and an OLED screen head intended to make the machine appear approachable in domestic and commercial settings. The TEAMS team that worked on Orca included Xiaoxiao Zhang, Miguel Kuri, Yufei Tao, Ivy Chen, and Wan Kee Lee. The design package added a chest LED strip for status display and a head mounted screen that doubles as the robot's emotional interface.[5][6]
Cyan introduced the Orca 1 in October 2024, less than a year after the company's founding. The robot was first showcased at the IROS 2024 robotics conference. By 2025, Cyan was selling Orca 1 directly to consumers and businesses through JD.com, one of the largest Chinese online retail platforms. Listed prices fell between $40,000 and $50,000, placing Orca 1 in the same general segment as competing Chinese humanoids from companies such as Unitree and EngineAI rather than the high six figure platforms produced by some Western firms.[1][2]
On April 19, 2025, Orca 1 took part in the world's first humanoid robot half-marathon, held in the E-Town district of Beijing. Twenty humanoid robots competed across the 21 kilometer course alongside human runners. Cyan's engineering team prepared by trimming more than two kilograms from the robot and fitting custom non-slip insoles. Orca 1 finished the race without any falls or mechanical failures and completed a battery swap in roughly two minutes. Cyan described the race as the robot's first long-distance outdoor run since its public debut and used it as a stress test for motion control, environmental adaptability, and endurance. Shanghai municipal coverage of the event credited the company's emphasis on knee straightening locomotion as a contributor to its uneventful finish.[3]
The Orca general humanoid robot platform won a Gold prize at the Asia Design Prize 2026 in the industrial category. The award listing credited TEAMS Design Shanghai as the design firm and Cyan Co., Ltd. as the client. The submission emphasized the rounded form factor, the friendly color palette, the OLED head display, and the chest LED strip as features that allow the robot to integrate into homes and aging-society service environments.[6]
The ORCA 1 is Cyan Robotics' flagship full-size humanoid robot. It is designed to operate as a research platform, training partner, and assistant in homes, eldercare facilities, and commercial spaces. The robot uses electric servo motors with a mixed harmonic and planetary reducer arrangement, an aluminum and polymer shell, and a Linux-based ROS2 software stack.[2][7]
| Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Standing height | Approximately 145 cm (1.45 m) |
| Weight with battery | 42 kg |
| Walking speed | 2.5 km/h (3 km/h max) |
| Battery runtime | About 2 hours per charge |
| Battery swap time | About 2 minutes |
| Total degrees of freedom | 40 |
| Hand degrees of freedom | 10 (5 fingers per hand) |
| Single arm payload | 3 kg |
| Dual arm payload | About 9 kg |
| Head display | OLED screen for emotional expressions |
| Cameras | 1080p binocular plus depth cameras |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, USB |
| Operating system | Linux with ROS2 |
| Compute | Industrial ARM CPU plus onboard GPU module |
| Response latency | Under 200 ms end-to-end |
| Price (JD.com listing) | $40,000 to $50,000 |
| Sales channel | JD.com (China) |
| Public debut | October 2024 |
Orca 1 walks with knees fully extended, a gait that more closely matches human walking than the bent-knee crouches used by many earlier bipedal research platforms. Cyan reports that the robot can climb stairs, spin in place, recover autonomously after falling, and hold a side split during balance demonstrations. The dual arm system gives the robot two five-finger hands that can grasp small objects in research and demonstration settings, although Cyan and third-party reviewers describe its manipulation maturity as still aimed at research and early industrial use rather than fine assembly work.[2][3][7]
The head OLED screen functions as a face replacement. It can render eye and mouth animations, display short notifications, and convey state information to people interacting with the robot. A chest mounted LED strip provides additional status feedback such as charging or active task indicators.[6][7]
One of Cyan's central research claims is its emotional gait large language model. The system maps situational mood states onto walking parameters such as cadence, stride length, posture, and arm swing. The result is that the robot can walk in styles Cyan describes as cheerful, sad, angry, or neutral depending on context, which the company argues makes its locomotion appear more natural and emotionally legible to people sharing a space with the machine. Cyan positions the technology as a contribution to human-robot trust, particularly in eldercare and education scenarios where the robot is expected to spend long periods near non-expert users.[1]
In addition to the gait model, Cyan develops a multimodal interaction system that combines speech, vision, and expressive output. The robot uses depth cameras for three-dimensional perception, an inertial measurement unit for balance, force and torque sensors in joints for safe handling, and microphone arrays for voice input. External cloud connectivity allows the robot to call out to larger language models for conversational tasks, although the onboard compute does not run a frontier LLM locally.[2][7]
Cyan describes its development model as full-stack in-house. The company designs and builds its hardware platform, writes its own motion control and decision making software, runs its own data collection and training pipelines, and integrates the human-machine interface layer rather than buying these layers from suppliers. This vertical integration is intended to give Cyan tighter control over latency, joint tuning, and gait synthesis, all of which feed directly into the emotional gait product claim.[1][3]
Cyan engineers report that the joint ranges of Orca 1 exceed standard human ranges in several axes, allowing poses such as the side split that human anatomy cannot reach. The company uses these joint capabilities both as a marketing demonstration and as headroom for future tasks that require unusual postures, such as crawling under low obstacles or reaching into confined spaces. The robot's reported sub 200 millisecond end-to-end response latency is intended to support real-time balance correction and reactive locomotion adjustments rather than purely teleoperated control.[2][7]
The Orca 1 runs Linux with ROS2 as its middleware. ROS2 gives Cyan compatibility with the broader robotics research community, which is helpful when selling Orca to academic labs and demonstration partners. Cyan publishes connectivity through Bluetooth, Ethernet, USB, and Wi-Fi for integration with external compute, sensors, and cloud services.[2][7]
Cyan markets Orca 1 across several use cases:
| Application area | Role |
|---|---|
| Eldercare | Companionship, light physical assistance, and presence monitoring for aging populations in China and other markets facing demographic shifts. |
| Education | Classroom and lab platform for teaching robotics, control systems, and human-robot interaction. |
| Physical therapy | Demonstration and pacing partner for guided movement exercises and gait rehabilitation. |
| Commercial service | Greeting, basic guidance, and showroom presence in retail, hospitality, and corporate lobbies. |
| Research | General purpose bipedal platform for academic groups working on locomotion, manipulation, and embodied AI. |
| Industrial demonstration | Stress testing for motion control and reliability, including outdoor events such as the 2025 Beijing humanoid half-marathon. |
Cyan reports that the eldercare angle is particularly relevant in China, where official population statistics show a rapidly aging society and where humanoid assistance is a recognized national policy priority.[1][3]
Cyan Robotics is privately held. The company has not publicly disclosed its venture capital rounds, valuation, or investor list as of 2026. Public records confirm support from the Shanghai Humanoid Robot Innovation Incubator, which provides early-stage robotics companies with infrastructure and access to regional supply chains. Cyan's pricing strategy on JD.com places its robot well below the entry price of many Western humanoid platforms, which the company has cited as a deliberate choice to make humanoid hardware available to research, education, and small business buyers in China.[1][3][4]
Cyan operates in one of the most active humanoid robotics ecosystems in the world. By 2025 and 2026, Chinese firms shipped more humanoid robots than any other country, supported by national subsidies, municipal incubators, and a deep robotics supply chain centered on Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing. Cyan is one of several Shanghai based startups that emerged from this period, alongside larger and better funded peers. The combination of an emotional gait pitch, an unusually approachable industrial design, and direct retail through JD.com gives Cyan a distinct positioning relative to competitors that target heavy industrial work or pure research customers.[1][2][3]
Third-party coverage of Orca 1 has highlighted its mobility reliability during the 2025 humanoid half-marathon and its straight-knee gait as differentiators. Reviewers writing for Mike Kalil's blog and Humanoid.guide noted that the robot's emotional expression layer and approachable look set it apart from purely utilitarian humanoids, although some pointed out that on standard manipulation and navigation benchmarks Orca 1 is still rated as a developing platform rather than a finished commercial workhorse.[1][2][7]