X-Humanoid
Last reviewed
May 9, 2026
Sources
23 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v6 · 3,165 words
Improve this article
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Suggest edit
CtrlK
Last reviewed
May 9, 2026
Sources
23 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v6 · 3,165 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
| X-Humanoid | |
|---|---|
| General information | |
| Full name | Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics Co., Ltd. |
| Chinese name | 北京人形机器人创新中心 |
| Established | November 2023 |
| Headquarters | Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area (Beijing Yizhuang), China |
| Industry | Robotics, Embodied AI |
| Products | Embodied Tien Kung platform, Wise KaiWu (Huisi Kaiwu) AI platform |
| General manager | Xiong Youjun |
| Chief technology officer | Tang Jian |
| Website | x-humanoid.com |
X-Humanoid is the brand name of the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics (Chinese: 北京人形机器人创新中心), a national-municipal joint initiative established in November 2023 in Beijing's Economic-Technological Development Area (Yizhuang). It was the first innovation center in China dedicated specifically to humanoid robot core technology development, product engineering, and application ecosystem construction. The center functions as an R&D and integration hub, providing shared laboratories, testbeds, and demonstration spaces where universities, startups, and manufacturers co-develop perception, control, and actuation technologies for humanoid robots.[1][2]
X-Humanoid is best known for the Tien Kung (Tiangong, 天工) family of full-size electrically driven humanoid robots and the Wise KaiWu (Huisi Kaiwu, 慧思开物) embodied AI software platform. In April 2025 a Tien Kung Ultra unit won the world's first humanoid robot half-marathon in Beijing, finishing the 21 km course in roughly two hours and forty minutes. In October 2024 the center was formally designated the National and Local Jointly Built Embodied Intelligence Robot Innovation Center, and in February 2026 it raised more than 700 million yuan (about US$100 million) in its first market-oriented funding round.[3][4][5]
The Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center was officially registered in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area (commonly called Yizhuang or E-Town) in November 2023. It was set up by the Beijing municipal government together with several private and state-owned shareholders, with the explicit goal of accelerating technological progress and commercialization of humanoid robots in China. According to Beijing's official announcement, the center was charged with building both hardware and software foundational platforms, addressing core challenges such as motion control systems and open-source robotics operating systems, and supporting national and city-level testing infrastructure for the industry.[2][6]
Four shareholders were involved at founding. Beijing Jingcheng Machinery Electric Holding Co., Ltd. (京城机电), Beijing Xiaomi Robotics Technology Co., Ltd. (a subsidiary of Xiaomi), and UBTech Robotics Corp. each held 28.57 percent of the joint venture, while a subsidiary of state-owned Yizhuang Holdings retained the remaining 14.29 percent. The Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences also participated as a co-founding research partner. Xiong Youjun, who serves as chief technology officer of UBTech Robotics, became general manager of X-Humanoid, while Tang Jian was named chief technology officer.[3][7]
The center was conceived within China's broader 2023 national strategy for humanoid robotics. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had announced earlier that year a target for mass production of humanoid robots by 2025, along with a plan to cultivate two or three globally influential humanoid robot companies. Beijing's Yizhuang district committed to assembling a complete supply chain in the area, eventually clustering more than one hundred humanoid robot and component companies around the center.[2][8]
In October 2024, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology designated the Beijing center as the National and Local Jointly Built Embodied Intelligence Robot Innovation Center (国家地方共建具身智能机器人创新中心). The designation gave X-Humanoid a unique role as the nationally recognized innovation hub for embodied intelligence, distinct from the five other major humanoid robot innovation centers later established in Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangdong, Anhui, and Zhejiang. As part of this status, the center took on responsibilities for shared testing infrastructure, standardization work, dataset curation, and open-sourcing of core technologies.[3][8]
On 19 April 2025, X-Humanoid's Tien Kung Ultra robot won the world's first humanoid robot half-marathon, held alongside the Beijing E-Town half-marathon in Yizhuang. Twenty robot teams started the 21.0975 km course at 7:30 a.m., racing on a parallel track to roughly twelve thousand human runners. Only six robots crossed the finish line, and Tien Kung Ultra was the only entry to come in under the three-hour qualifying threshold set by the Chinese Athletic Association, finishing in approximately two hours and forty minutes.[4][9]
During the race, engineers from X-Humanoid jogged alongside Tien Kung Ultra to monitor the system. The robot underwent three to four hot battery swaps along the route, with each swap completed in roughly three to four minutes according to organizers. Other notable competitors included Unitree's G1, Leju Robotics' Kuavo, and NOETIX's N2, which finished second among the surviving robots in about three hours and thirty-seven minutes. The event drew global media coverage and was widely interpreted as both a public demonstration of progress and an honest stress test that revealed how far humanoid locomotion still has to go.[4][9][10]
In August 2025, the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games were held over three days at the National Speed Skating Oval in Beijing, with 280 teams from sixteen countries competing across 26 sports. X-Humanoid finished tied with Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics at the top of the medal table, taking ten medals including two golds. Tien Kung Ultra won the 100-meter sprint with a time of 21.50 seconds, and the team also took gold in a novel-materials handling event that simulated factory floor scenarios. The Tien Kung Ultra also served as the central flag bearer at the games' opening.[11][12]
According to CTO Tang Jian, the Tien Kung was the only robot in the running events that competed entirely under autonomous navigation rather than relying on a human operator with a remote control. The system used real-time perception and motion planning, an upgrade from the ultra-wideband (UWB) semi-autonomous navigation it had used at the half-marathon a few months earlier.[11]
From 6 to 8 January 2026, X-Humanoid exhibited at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, showing the Embodied Tien Kung 2.0, the Embodied Tien Kung Ultra, and the Wise KaiWu AI platform. On the show floor, Tien Kung 2.0 demonstrated autonomous parts sorting, with the company highlighting fast response times based on its UVMC technology, motion control loops running above 60 Hz, and resilient bimanual coordination. Tien Kung Ultra was presented as the world's first half-marathon-winning humanoid robot and was reported to have run a 100 m time of 21.50 seconds.[13]
At the same event, X-Humanoid disclosed several deployment partnerships, including unmanned production lines at Foton Cummins engine plants, power-grid inspection work with the China Electric Power Research Institute, athletic testing with the Li-Ning Sports Science Laboratory, and a pharmaceutical-manufacturing collaboration with Bayer.[13]
On 3 February 2026, X-Humanoid closed its first market-oriented funding round of more than 700 million yuan, equivalent to about US$100 million. The round was led by state-linked vehicles, including the Beijing Robotics Industry Development Investment Fund, E-Town Capital, and the Beijing Gaojingjian Industrial Development Investment Fund, with TH Capital also participating. Strategic investors included Baidu and Kyland Technology Co., Ltd. The center said the proceeds would be used to advance embodied AI software, scale production of the Tien Kung family, and bridge laboratory prototypes to production-grade deployment through its pilot manufacturing facility.[5][14]
By that point the center was operating a 9,700-square-meter pilot verification facility in Beijing's E-Town development zone, completed in 2025, with annual production capacity of around 2,000 humanoid units and a stated target of 5,000 units. According to Caixin, the Tien Kung family was being offered to industrial and research customers at prices ranging from 299,000 to 779,000 yuan, and the 1,000th customized unit had been rolled off the line in January 2026.[5]
On 10 February 2026, X-Humanoid unveiled the Embodied Tien Kung 3.0 at a launch event in Beijing, with the formal press announcement following on 16 February. The center described it as the industry's first full-size humanoid robot to combine whole-body high-dynamic motion control with tactile interaction. In demonstrations the robot vaulted a one-meter wall using a single hand, climbed 134 stairs continuously, and performed kneeling, bending, and turning maneuvers in confined spaces.[15][16]
On 18 April 2026, Tien Kung 3.0 won the inaugural Beijing Yizhuang Robot Warrior Challenge, completing the entire course autonomously without human intervention or remote control. The event was designed to evaluate humanoid robots in scenarios modeled on disaster response and hazardous operations, with tasks including pendulum traversal, barrier breaching, and obstacle clearance. The robot achieved the highest overall score and received the Warrior Intelligent Mobility Award, becoming the first fully autonomous winner of the challenge.[16][17]
The Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics Co., Ltd. is structured as a joint venture rather than a pure government laboratory or a private startup, which was unusual at its founding. The shareholding split among Jingcheng Machinery Electric, Xiaomi Robotics, UBTech, and Yizhuang Holdings reflected a deliberate effort to bring together a state-owned industrial conglomerate, two leading consumer electronics and robotics companies, and a state development arm under one roof. The Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences contributed research support, particularly on motion control and embodied intelligence.[3][7]
The top management team is drawn primarily from UBTech. General manager Xiong Youjun continues to serve as UBTech's chief technology officer, while Tang Jian leads X-Humanoid's technology efforts as CTO. Public coverage has identified Tang Jian as the most visible technical spokesperson for the center, particularly during the half-marathon and the World Humanoid Robot Games, where he discussed the move from semi-autonomous UWB navigation to full autonomy.[3][11]
X-Humanoid markets two complementary product lines: the Embodied Tien Kung family of humanoid robot bodies and the Wise KaiWu (Huisi Kaiwu) software platform that powers them. Together they form what the company calls a closed loop of perception, decision-making, and execution.[15]
The Embodied Tien Kung is positioned as a universal full-size humanoid robot platform, engineered for long endurance, meaningful payload capacity, and coordinated bimanual manipulation. According to the center's own materials, it was the world's first full-size purely electrically driven humanoid robot capable of human-like running, achieving roughly 12 km/h on complex terrain. The first generation Tien Kung was made widely available for secondary development, with the platform reportedly opened to several hundred academic and commercial institutions.[8]
The latest version, Embodied Tien Kung 3.0, was introduced in February 2026 with significant upgrades in balance, motion control, and fully autonomous operation. The company describes it as the industry's first full-size humanoid robot to achieve whole-body high-dynamic motion control integrated with tactile interaction. In demonstrations Tien Kung 3.0 cleared a one-meter obstacle, performed parkour-style movements, and operated stably under disturbance.[15][16]
The robot has multiple expansion interfaces that support flexible integration of various end-effectors and tools, enabling rapid adaptation to specialized operations, industrial manufacturing, and commercial services. Reported demonstrations include warehouse logistics, fruit and tableware sorting, block stacking, and walking across slopes, sand, grass, and gravel.[18]
| Specification | Tien Kung 2.0 | Tien Kung 3.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Height | ~170 cm | ~169 cm |
| Weight | ~70 to 90 kg | ~62 kg |
| Walking speed | ~10 km/h | ~4 km/h nominal, 6 to 8 km/h max |
| Top reported speed | ~12 km/h on complex terrain | (pending public disclosure) |
| Degrees of freedom | 20 (whole body) | 43 (whole body), 12 in hands |
| Joint peak torque | not disclosed | ~400 N·m |
| Hands | Five-fingered dexterous hands | Five-fingered, 12 DoF |
| Battery system | Dual hot-swap batteries | Approx. 1.5 to 2 hour runtime |
| Compute | NVIDIA Jetson Orin AI modules | Custom robotics OS, open control stack |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi, voice, app | 5G, Ethernet, Wi-Fi |
| Software | Wise KaiWu | Wise KaiWu, ROS2, MQTT, TCP/IP |
| Reported list price | ~299,000 yuan (~US$41,000) | ~US$125,000 |
Figures above combine specifications published by X-Humanoid with third-party robotics databases; some values for Tien Kung 3.0 had not been formally disclosed by the company at launch.[19][20][21]
Tien Kung Ultra is a high-endurance variant of the platform tuned for outdoor running and competition use. Public sources describe it at 180 cm tall and 55 kg, with hot-swappable battery packs that allow extended operation. It is the version that won the Beijing humanoid robot half-marathon in April 2025 and the 100 m sprint at the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games, and it is positioned by X-Humanoid as a flagship demonstration of full-size electric-drive humanoid mobility.[3][11][13]
The Wise KaiWu (慧思开物) platform is a general-purpose embodied AI stack that integrates cognitive and physical systems into a closed-loop architecture for perception, decision-making, and execution. The center frames it as a dual-brain system, in which a small brain handles real-time motion control while a large brain manages higher-level reasoning, language understanding, and task planning. A single instance of the central intelligence can manage several robots or multiple skill sets at once.[18][22]
The stack includes a world model, a vision-language model (Pelican-VL), and a vision-language-action (VLA) model used for real-time control and obstacle avoidance. It supports common robotics protocols including ROS2, MQTT, and TCP/IP, and provides a low-code development environment with extensive documentation, which the center says allows third parties to extend functionality without restructuring the underlying systems. The Tien Kung 2.0 hardware platform runs Wise KaiWu on NVIDIA Jetson Orin compute modules.[15][20]
X-Humanoid distributes a substantial portion of its work through its Open-X-Humanoid GitHub organization. Public repositories include TienKung-Lab, a reinforcement learning training framework for legged robots built on the Isaac Lab workflow; XR-1, a vision-language-action framework for cross-embodiment manipulation; the x-humanoid-training-toolchain, which links Tien Kung hardware to the RoboMIND dataset and the LeRobot framework; TienKung_URDF, the robot's mechanical description files; Deploy_Tienkung, a C++ control implementation; TienKung_ROS, the low-level ROS-based software stack; and RoboMIND-Sim, a simulation environment.[23]
Alongside the code, X-Humanoid has released the RoboMIND V1.0 and V2.0 datasets, which together contain more than 100,000 demonstration trajectories across multiple robot embodiments, as well as ArtVIP, a collection of 206 high-quality digital-twin articulated objects in USD format. RoboMIND was developed in collaboration with Peking University and has been downloaded more than 15,000 times worldwide. With the Tien Kung 3.0 release the center went further and open-sourced the robot body design, motion control framework, world model, embodied VLM, and training toolchains, in what observers described as one of China's most aggressive plays for a global humanoid developer ecosystem.[16][17][22][23]
The pilot verification facility in Yizhuang serves as both a manufacturing line and a customer integration center. By early 2026 the facility had reached an annual production capacity of about 2,000 units, with a target of 5,000, and had delivered its 1,000th customized robot. Tien Kung units have been sold to industrial and research buyers at prices between 299,000 and 779,000 yuan depending on configuration.[5]
Reported real-world deployments include unmanned production lines at Foton Cummins engine plants, where Tien Kung 2.0 takes part in parts sorting and assist tasks, and power-grid inspection work conducted with the China Electric Power Research Institute, in which the robot performs walk-arounds and visual checks of equipment that would otherwise put human workers in awkward or hazardous conditions. The center has also worked with the Li-Ning Sports Science Laboratory on athletic testing applications and signed a pharmaceutical-manufacturing collaboration with Bayer that explores how humanoid robots can support cleanroom and high-precision tasks. In public demonstrations the robot has handled fruit, tableware, blocks, and warehouse parcels, and walked across slopes, sand, grass, and gravel without significant adjustment.[13][18]
X-Humanoid is generally treated in international press coverage as one of the most visible faces of China's humanoid robot push. The South China Morning Post described the center's stated ambition as becoming an Android-equivalent platform for AI-enabled robotic systems, with the Tien Kung body and Wise KaiWu stack playing the role of a shared substrate for the wider Chinese ecosystem. Coverage of the half-marathon was mixed in tone, celebrating Tien Kung Ultra's win while also noting the many robots that fell, trembled, or failed to finish, which observers used as a public reminder that even basic humanoid locomotion remains hard.[1][10]
The Caixin and Pandaily reports on the funding round emphasized the unusual structure of the center, with state-linked anchor investors and strategic backers from across the Chinese tech industry, including Baidu. Analysts cited in those reports treated the round as a sign that Chinese policymakers and large-cap technology firms were aligning behind a shared platform play rather than backing a long list of competing startups. The Tien Kung 3.0 open-sourcing was framed by industry commentators as part of the same strategy: building a developer base around an openly available Chinese humanoid stack at a moment when several Western competitors were tightening their intellectual property positions.[5][14][16]