INFIFORCE / ELU.AI
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Last reviewed
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INFIFORCE (also operating under the brand ELU.AI or ELU Robotics) is a Chinese AI-driven robotics company specializing in embodied intelligence and humanoid robots. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Hangzhou, with R&D centers in Shenzhen and Beijing, INFIFORCE develops general-purpose humanoid robots and autonomous service robots powered by its proprietary vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models. The company's flagship product is the AstroD AD-01 wheeled humanoid robot, complemented by the FORCE autonomous mobile charging robot and a portfolio of bionic hardware components branded as Hyper-Components.[1][2]
The company operates through its corporate website at elu-ai.com and presents its work under the slogan "One AI Brain, Awakening Every Soul," emphasizing a strategy of pairing a single intelligence platform with multiple robotic bodies for different tasks and environments.[3]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Legal/brand names | INFIFORCE, ELU.AI, ELU Robotics |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Headquarters | Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China |
| R&D centers | Shenzhen, Beijing |
| Founder and CEO | Isabella Bai |
| Industry | Robotics, embodied AI, humanoid robots |
| Website | elu-ai.com |
| Tagline | One AI Brain, Awakening Every Soul |
INFIFORCE was founded in 2023 with a focus on creating embodied AI systems that integrate perception, cognition, decision-making, and execution into a unified framework. The company's central thesis is that humanoid hardware has matured faster than the cognitive systems that control it, and that the next bottleneck in robotics is intelligence rather than mechanical engineering.[1]
From inception, the company assembled a team that includes executives from Global 500 firms and a scientific group where over 75 percent of members hold master's or PhD degrees. The leadership pursued a dual track strategy of deploying lower-complexity service robots in the field while building a more general humanoid platform in parallel.[1][2]
During 2024 and 2025, INFIFORCE concentrated initial commercial deployment on the FORCE autonomous mobile charging robot, which targets electric vehicle charging in public locations such as transit hubs and shopping centers. The company describes this as a "robot finds vehicle" model, inverting the traditional pattern in which drivers must seek out fixed charging stalls. By February 2026, INFIFORCE reported cumulative deliveries of 300 FORCE units, operations in more than 20 cities, more than 90 client organizations, service provided to roughly 100,000 vehicle owners, and over 200,000 charging orders fulfilled.[4]
INFIFORCE unveiled the AstroDroid AD-01 humanoid robot on September 24, 2025, at the Apsara Conference 2025 in Hangzhou, an annual technology event hosted by Alibaba Cloud. The reveal positioned the robot as more than mechanical hardware, presenting it as an embodied intelligence platform built around the company's Hyper-VLA model and an integrated "thinking AI Brain."[3]
At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, INFIFORCE founder and CEO Isabella Bai joined a panel titled "Not Quite Human: How Humanoids are Changing Work and Home Life." Bai used the appearance to argue that China was shifting from manufacturing-led robotics to cognitive definition of next-generation embodied intelligence, and that real-world physical interaction data, rather than internet-scale text, would be the binding constraint on progress in robotic intelligence. The company showcased its proprietary Causal World Model and Hyper-VLA foundation model at the event, alongside the AstroDroid platform.[1][5]
In statements coinciding with CES 2026, Bai compared a robot lacking causal understanding to "a sophisticated puppet," and presented a "Data, Model, Body, Scenario" growth flywheel intended to feed live deployment data back into model training.[5]
By 2025, INFIFORCE had accumulated more than 35 invention and utility model patents, along with 20 software copyrights. The company also reported more than 30 additional core technology patents under application as of early 2026 and stated a target of more than 100 granted patents over time.[1][2]
Isabella Bai is the founder and CEO of INFIFORCE. Public materials emphasize her role as the company's principal spokesperson on embodied AI strategy. At CES 2026, Bai framed the present moment in robotics as a transition "from traditional manufacturing-led innovation to cognitive definition," and stressed that the data needed to train robust embodied agents must come from physical operation rather than from web-scraped text.[1][5]
Quotes attributed to Bai in coverage of CES 2026 and related press materials include:
INFIFORCE structures its product portfolio around three lines: the AstroDroid humanoid robot series, the FORCE autonomous mobile charging robot, and a family of Hyper-Components used both in INFIFORCE robots and as standalone modules.
The AstroD AD-01 (also written as AstroDroid AD-01) is INFIFORCE's flagship humanoid robot. It pairs a wheeled mobility platform with a humanoid upper body, prioritizing efficient indoor coverage over bipedal locomotion while still delivering human-comparable reach and dexterity through its arms and hands.[6]
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Height | 170 cm |
| Weight | 120 kg |
| Total degrees of freedom | 43 |
| Hand DOF | 11 per hand |
| Fingers | 10 total |
| Grip strength | 3 kg |
| Mobility | Wheeled base, hybrid configuration |
| Maximum speed | 7.2 km/h overall |
| Walking speed | 2 km/h |
| Runtime | About 2 hours per charge |
| AI model | Hyper-VLA |
| Onboard processor | NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 64GB |
| Operating system | Linux (Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04) with ROS 2 |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi 6, Gigabit Ethernet, optional 4G or 5G, Bluetooth 5.0 |
| End-to-end response | About 200 ms |
| Ingress protection | IP42 |
| Status | Advanced prototype, pilot programs planned for 2025 |
| Listed price | About 100,000 USD |
| Target environments | Factories, warehouses, retail, research and education |
The AD-01's dexterous hands offer 11 DOF each, with a total of 10 fingers across the two hands and a roughly 3 kg grip per hand, enabling fine manipulation of small objects such as tools, packages, and consumer goods. The frame combines aluminum alloy, carbon fiber composites, and engineering plastics, and the joints use brushless DC motors with harmonic drive reducers and planetary gears for position and torque control.[6]
INFIFORCE describes the AD-01 series as the start of an expanding family of humanoid robots covering additional sizes and configurations as the platform scales.[2]
FORCE is INFIFORCE's autonomous service robot for electric vehicle charging. Rather than waiting at a fixed bay for vehicles to arrive, FORCE units navigate parking areas to reach vehicles where they are parked, performing what the company calls a "robot finds vehicle" charging paradigm.[1][4]
Key features of the FORCE platform include:
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Function | Autonomous mobile EV charging |
| Autonomy level | L4-level autonomous driving in operating zones |
| Coordination | Multi-robot collaborative scheduling |
| Intelligence layer | Same "one brain" platform shared with AstroDroid |
| Anchor customers | Sinopec, Wanda, Intime |
Reported deployments include Hangzhou East Railway Station, Hangzhou West Railway Station, Intime Department Store, and Wanda Plaza locations. By February 2026, INFIFORCE reported the FORCE fleet had reached 300 cumulative deliveries, served around 100,000 vehicle owners, and processed over 200,000 charging orders across more than 20 cities and 90 client organizations.[4]
INFIFORCE also markets Hyper-Components, a family of execution and perception modules used inside its own robots and offered to other developers. The most prominently described component is HyperArm, a lightweight bionic robotic arm designed for precise physical execution and integrated hardware-software control. Hyper-Components are positioned as standalone building blocks for partners that wish to build embodied AI systems on INFIFORCE technology without producing a full humanoid platform.[1][5]
INFIFORCE has developed two core AI technologies that together form the cognitive layer for its robots: the Causal World Model and the Hyper-VLA foundation model. The company describes the combination as an attempt to give robots a "super brain" that can understand the world, learn continuously, and act autonomously across changing environments.[1]
The Causal World Model is INFIFORCE's framework for giving robots an internal representation of physical cause and effect. Rather than only predicting the next sensor observation in a statistical sense, the model is intended to track which actions cause which outcomes and which physical laws constrain those outcomes. The company positions this as a response to the "hallucination" and safety problems that arise when robots act on plausible but physically inconsistent predictions.[1][5]
In INFIFORCE's framing, the Causal World Model lets a robot do three things in sequence: anticipate the result of a candidate action, compare that prediction to its goal, and reject or refine actions that violate physical constraints before they are executed.[5]
The Hyper-VLA (Vision-Language-Action) Foundation Model is INFIFORCE's end-to-end multimodal model. It accepts visual input from on-robot cameras and natural language instructions, performs internal reasoning, and emits motor and gripper commands directly. The company calls the resulting flow a "Perception, Cognition, Decision, Execution" closed loop, and reports an end-to-end glass-to-action latency of approximately 200 milliseconds on the AD-01 platform.[1][6]
Hyper-VLA is operated through a cloud-edge collaborative architecture: large reasoning workloads can run in the cloud while time-critical perception and control loops execute on the robot's onboard NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin compute platform.[6]
INFIFORCE markets a unifying strategy described as "One Brain, Multiple Bodies, Multiple Scenarios." Under this approach, both the AstroDroid humanoid line and the FORCE service robot line share the same core intelligence platform, with hardware bodies and skill stacks tailored to specific deployment scenarios. The company argues that this model allows learning gathered in one environment, such as charging bay navigation, to feed back into manipulation and mobility in unrelated tasks such as warehousing.[2][4]
In its CES 2026 messaging, INFIFORCE described a "Data, Model, Body, Scenario" growth flywheel: real-world deployments generate physical interaction data, that data improves the Hyper-VLA model and Causal World Model, the improved models enable more capable bodies, and more capable bodies open new deployment scenarios. The company points to its FORCE rollout as a working example of this loop, in which production charging operations supply training data for future iterations of its embodied AI stack.[5]
The AD-01 is designed for deployment across multiple sectors:
The FORCE robot is deployed primarily in transportation and commercial real estate environments, including railway stations, department stores, and shopping plazas, where it provides on-demand mobile charging for electric vehicles.[4]
As of 2025, the AD-01 was in an advanced prototype stage with pilot deployments planned for commercial customers, while FORCE units were in active production-grade operation across the company's anchor customer base.[4][6]
INFIFORCE has reported substantial early commercial traction relative to other 2023-vintage humanoid robotics startups, primarily through its FORCE service robot business. Anchor customers and commercial figures include:
| Metric or customer | Detail |
|---|---|
| Total commercial orders | About CNY 500 million (about USD 71.55 million) |
| Reported sectors | Automotive, healthcare |
| Anchor enterprise customers | Sinopec, Wanda, Intime |
| Cities with FORCE operations | More than 20 |
| Client organizations served | More than 90 |
| Vehicle owners served by FORCE | About 100,000 |
| Charging orders fulfilled | More than 200,000 |
| FORCE units delivered | 300 cumulative by February 2026 |
The automotive and healthcare sectors are the company's main reported revenue verticals as of early 2026, with the FORCE platform driving most of the disclosed unit volume and AstroDroid AD-01 still operating in a prototype and pilot stage.[1][4]
INFIFORCE has filed and obtained intellectual property protection across both hardware and AI model development. As of 2025 and early 2026, the company has reported the following figures:
| Category | Count |
|---|---|
| Granted invention and utility model patents | More than 35 |
| Software copyrights | 20 |
| Core technology patents under application | More than 30 |
| Long-term patent target | More than 100 |
INFIFORCE describes the patent and copyright base as covering both the AstroDroid hardware platform and elements of the Hyper-VLA and Causal World Model software stack, although it has not publicly disaggregated the portfolio between hardware and AI software.[1][2]
INFIFORCE operates in a Chinese humanoid robotics sector that grew rapidly during 2024 and 2025, with Hangzhou in particular emerging as a notable center of embodied AI activity alongside Beijing and Shenzhen. The company positions itself in this landscape primarily through its insistence that intelligence, not hardware, is the binding constraint on practical humanoid robotics, and through the dual-track approach of fielding service robots like FORCE while developing the AstroDroid humanoid platform.[1][5]
The Apsara Conference 2025, where AD-01 was unveiled, also showcased more than 200 agent applications and 300 AI terminal products, situating the AD-01 launch in the broader Chinese push toward artificial general intelligence and embodied intelligence systems during that period.[3]