Lingbao CASBOT
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Last reviewed
Jun 4, 2026
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Lingbao CASBOT (Chinese: 灵宝CASBOT) is the humanoid robot brand of Beijing Zhongke Huiling Robot Technology Co., Ltd. (北京中科慧灵机器人技术有限公司), a Chinese embodied AI and humanoid robot company founded in August 2023 and headquartered in the Zhongguancun area of Haidian District, Beijing. The company grew out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation (CASIA), and its founding team specializes in machine vision, precision assembly, visual servoing, and robot skill learning. Lingbao CASBOT is best known for CASBOT 01, a full-size bipedal humanoid nicknamed "Wednesday" (星期三) that was unveiled in November 2024 and shown internationally at CES 2025, and for a stated strategy of moving humanoids out of demonstrations and into real industrial work such as factory assembly and mining.
The name "Lingbao" here refers to the robot brand and should not be confused with Lingbao, a city in Henan province. The all-caps "CASBOT" branding nods to the company's Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) origins.
Beijing Zhongke Huiling Robot Technology was established in August 2023. The company describes itself as a product of decades of research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation, where its core team worked for years on machine vision, motion control, and intelligent systems before spinning out. According to Chinese coverage, members of the founding team had previously built micro-target precision assembly systems, quadruped-robot environmental perception, and fastener-assembly robots for the C919 commercial aircraft, and the chairman's group spent roughly three years (from 2011) teaching a robot to play table tennis for a Ministry of Science and Technology project.
The company keeps a deliberately compact team. Chinese reports from 2025 stated that 100% of staff held bachelor's degrees or higher and that more than half had backgrounds from top-tier ("985/211") or overseas universities.
| Person | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Zhang Zhengtao (张正涛) | Founder, chairman, chief scientist | CASIA researcher and doctoral supervisor; director of the CAS Engineering Laboratory for Industrial Vision Intelligent Equipment Technology |
| Xu De (徐德) | Chief scientist | CASIA researcher and doctoral supervisor, known for visual servoing and precision-assembly research |
| Zhang Miao (张淼) | Co-founder and COO | Tsinghua University master's degree, Tsinghua-MIT joint MBA; former senior AI strategy analyst and product manager at Tencent; leads commercialization, financing, and operations |
| Yang Guodong (杨国栋) | Co-founder, head of the Movement Intelligence Center | Leads locomotion and the CASBOT SE marathon program |
Lingbao CASBOT has raised capital through two reported angel-stage rounds, each on the order of 100 million yuan. Early backing came from Lenovo (the company disclosed support from Lenovo's Beijing entity as early as March 2024), and Lenovo Capital later anchored the formal angel round.
| Round | Date announced | Amount | Lead / notable investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angel | February 2025 | Over 100 million yuan ("超亿元") | Lenovo Capital (联想创投), SDIC Venture Capital / Guotou Chuanghe (国投创合), Henan Asset Fund (河南资产) |
| Angel+ | June 2025 | Nearly 100 million yuan ("近亿元") | Led by Lens Technology (蓝思科技) and Tianjin Jiayi (天津佳益); follow-on from SDIC Venture Capital and Henan Asset |
The company said the proceeds would go toward mass production, R&D iteration, and market expansion. Coverage noted that Lens Technology, a major consumer-electronics components supplier, was making its second humanoid-robot investment after backing AgiBot, and Chinese outlets framed Lingbao's backers as "factory-faction" investors interested in deployable industrial robots rather than pure research demos.
CASBOT 01, the company's first product, was released on November 13, 2024 and positioned as a general-purpose, brain-like ("类脑") intelligent humanoid for multiple scenarios. It was subsequently shown at CES 2025 in Las Vegas (January 7 to 10, 2025), where international media picked up its "550 trillion operations per second" compute figure and the "Wednesday" nickname.
| Specification | CASBOT 01 |
|---|---|
| Height | 1.79 m |
| Weight | About 60 kg |
| Degrees of freedom | 52 |
| Onboard compute | 550 TOPS |
| Battery life | Over 4 hours of continuous operation |
| Hands | Self-developed five-finger dexterous hands; about 5 kg single-hand payload (each hand around 800 g) |
| Head | 2 degrees of freedom with vision and audio sensors |
In demonstrations the robot was shown standing, walking, running, and jumping, and performing fine manipulation tasks such as folding clothes, assembling a desk lamp, changing a light bulb, and tightening screws. The company targeted industrial manufacturing, aerospace and aviation, hazardous or special operations, emergency rescue, and commercial service work. At launch, CASBOT 01 was not yet mass-produced; management said it would iterate the design through one or two more generations during 2025 before small-batch production.
CASBOT 02 is a lighter, interaction-oriented humanoid launched on June 16, 2025 and sold through JD.com (京东) at a list price of 328,800 yuan, placing it in the middle of the market between roughly 200,000-yuan simplified models and 500,000-yuan-plus imported or research machines. It uses a modular "skeleton and shell separation" design to cut weight and cost. Reported specifications vary slightly by configuration:
| Specification | CASBOT 02 |
|---|---|
| Height | About 1.63 m |
| Weight | About 50 to 55 kg |
| Degrees of freedom | 25 in the base configuration; up to 47 with dexterous hands |
| Onboard compute | 275 TOPS (NVIDIA Jetson-class Orin AGX plus an RK3588) |
| Sensors | RGB-D camera, stereo camera, fisheye camera, microphone array; LiDAR on the EDU version |
| Capabilities | Face tracking, voice recognition in noisy environments, person following, multimodal interaction |
The robot is aimed at science museums, showrooms, reception and greeting, retail guidance, and education. The company described the JD.com listing as the official start of its consumer-channel layout.
CASBOT SE is a stripped-down sport variant developed for the world's first humanoid-robot half marathon. Standing about 1.7 m and weighing about 48 kg, it removed the dexterous hands and heavy vision stack to save weight and improve speed, and used self-developed integrated joints built for flexibility and impact resistance. CASBOT SE competed in the 2025 Beijing E-Town (Yizhuang) half marathon held on April 19, 2025, the first race to put humanoid robots on the same 21.0975 km course as human runners. The event was won by Tiangong Ultra (from the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center) in about 2 hours 40 minutes; only a minority of the roughly 20 robot teams finished. Yang Guodong, who led the program, publicly discussed the engineering challenges of long-distance bipedal running.
Lingbao CASBOT pursues full self-development of its robot software and selective in-house development of hardware, building its own dexterous hands because off-the-shelf options could not meet the precision needed for factory assembly. Management has described the robots' autonomy as sitting between "L3 and L4."
The control stack uses a hierarchical end-to-end model combined with reinforcement-learning post-training. The company splits an on-device embodied model from a cloud-side large model, and applies an "offline then online" two-step fine-tuning method in which reinforcement learning is introduced in the online phase. It uses closed-loop training on operational data, including force-sensor feedback and visual error signals, to keep improving tasks such as screw tightening and part sorting. For higher-level reasoning the company uses a Vision-Language-Action model paired with reinforcement learning to cope with the variability of real manufacturing environments. This places its approach within the broader move toward the robot foundation model paradigm.
To improve data quality, Lingbao CASBOT and CASIA jointly developed a "real human domain" data-collection system that captures human demonstrations through dense tactile-sensor gloves and vision glasses, rather than relying solely on robot teleoperation. The COO has argued that conventional teleoperation data is distorted and leaves robots operating at roughly 30% of human efficiency, which the human-demonstration pipeline is meant to address.
Lingbao CASBOT's go-to-market strategy is business-to-business first, with consumer applications considered for later. In September 2024 it signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Lenovo and began deploying robots in Lenovo's smart-manufacturing facilities for fine assembly work such as grasping, twisting, plugging, and tool use on notebook production lines.
The company has also moved into mining and heavy industry, reporting orders or partnerships with mineral and energy leaders including Zhaojin Group (招金集团), China Mining Group (中矿集团), and CITIC Heavy Industries (中信重工). These deployments target underground operations, quality inspection, and special rescue scenarios, demand that the company links to Chinese mine-safety policy aiming to replace humans in dangerous posts by the end of 2026. Management has said its production goal is small-batch delivery of around 100 units each across three product lines (full-size bipeds, wheeled humanoids, and standalone dexterous hands) tied to real customer orders.
Chinese technology media have generally framed Lingbao CASBOT as a "pragmatic" or "technical-pragmatist" player that avoids competing on single headline specifications and instead emphasizes deployable industrial use cases, deep CASIA research roots, and revenue from real orders. International coverage at CES 2025 focused on the CASBOT 01 compute figure and its task demonstrations, presenting it as part of the broader wave of Chinese humanoid robots alongside firms such as Unitree, UBTech, Fourier Intelligence, RobotEra, and Galaxea Dynamics within a fast-growing humanoid robot market.
Humanoid robot - Embodied AI - Bipedal locomotion - Robot manipulation - AgiBot - Unitree - Robot foundation model