Walker Tienkung

Walker Tienkung is a full-size research humanoid that UBTech launched on 12 March 2025 together with the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Centre, the state-backed institute behind the Tiangong robots. Its point is the price: 299,000 yuan, which the maker presents as the first research-grade full-size humanoid to list under 300,000 yuan. Laboratories that previously had to commission a machine or import one can now order a catalogue item, and that is the whole design brief - not a new capability, but a lower threshold. The body is 170 cm tall with a 20-degree-of-freedom humanoid configuration and a stable running speed of 10 km/h, which puts it among the machines that actually run rather than walk quickly. The joints are UBTech's own integrated modules with a peak torque of 300 Nm, and the structure combines aerospace aluminium with titanium alloy to keep the mass down. Power is unusual for the class: a quick-release pack of 30 Ah plus a 3 Ah reserve, with whole-body air ducting for cooling, which the maker says allows eight hours of continuous work without heat build-up. For a laboratory that runs the same experiment dozens of times a day, uptime matters more than a headline demonstration. The machine is sold as a platform rather than a finished worker. The base configuration can be extended with a seven-degree-of-freedom collaborative arm, a six-degree-of-freedom dexterous hand and a three-degree-of-freedom head module, and on the sensing side with a depth camera, an AI voice kit, a six-axis force sensor, a lidar and an NVIDIA Orin compute board. UBTech names the research scenarios it expects: commercial service, rough terrain, industrial logistics, healthcare, home service and power-line inspection. What makes it usable for research is openness. UBTech publishes interfaces to the motors, sensors and motion control, supports the ROS 2 ecosystem, ships high-precision URDF models, an open-source training framework, developer guides and sample code, and allows the robot to be connected to its Co-Agent embodied-intelligence platform. The company has also announced open embodied-AI datasets, including multi-view RGB-D imagery and end-effector states, to be released progressively. One caveat for readers: UBTech's English product page for this robot carries no numbers at all. Every figure above comes from the maker's Chinese page and from the March 2025 launch coverage, and the price is a Chinese domestic list price - the company has not published an export price.

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