Why Robotics Matters to US National Security

Robotics is not merely about improving manufacturing efficiency or making another billion off of consumer gadgets. It stands to reshape the future architecture of economic and military power. Banks and market research groups project the market for the machines and related services will surge to $7 trillion by 2050, and envision a world populated by hundreds of millions of human-like robots. Demographic decline and major strides in AI are further accelerating demand for “embodied intelligence.” As it faces a dearth of physical laborers and the dawn of intelligence too cheap to meter, the key question now facing the United States is how to build a capable and modern manufacturing base. The answer lies in mobile platforms capable of rendering services in physical space.

China has figured this out. President Xi Jinping has made robotics a central pillar of the country’s economic growth model in the 2020s. China’s 14th Five-Year Plan lists “robotics and smart manufacturing” as a cornerstone of its industrial innovation, with China aiming to be a global innovation hub by 2025 and a world leader by 2035. Beijing is well on the way to achieving this objective; between 2013 and 2022, Chinese universities added over 7,500 new engineering majors, with nearly 100 focused specifically on robotics. China’s academic output is already surpassing American contributions at major robotics and computer vision conferences. Moreover, Chinese institutions hold more than 190,000 robot-related patents, two-thirds of the global total. The country is already home to more than half of the top humanoid robotics companies.

The economics of this competition are even more striking. Founded in 2016, China’s robotics champion, Unitree, now sells its G1 humanoid robot for $16,000—about one-tenth the cost of comparable Western systems. Their quadrupeds, or “robot dogs,” are even more dominant in price-to-performance. To be clear, these are not low-quality Chinese knockoffs of Western products. They are robots that function well, at prices that make Western alternatives look like luxury goods no customer can afford to buy at scale. This is why China shipped 10 times as many robots as Boston Dynamics to customers in 100 countries last year.

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