UBTECH Walker S

Positioning and availability

UBTECH Walker S is an advanced humanoid robot designed for industrial environments. Standing 170 cm tall and weighing approximately 76 kg, it matches the dimensions of an average factory worker, enabling seamless integration into existing human-scale production lines without costly facility modifications. The Walker S is actively deployed at NIO, BYD and Zeekr EV factories and at a Foxconn AI server manufacturing facility in Houston, Texas, in partnership with NVIDIA. In 2023, the Walker S symbolically struck the gong at UBTECH's Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO — making UBTECH the world's first publicly listed humanoid robotics company.

Mechanical structure and actuation

The Walker S has 41 degrees of freedom: 14 in the arms (7 per arm), 12 in the legs (6 per leg), 3 in the waist, and 10+ in the hands for multi-finger precision grasping. The skeleton is aerospace-grade aluminium alloy; polycarbonate panels with rubberised impact zones form a rigid-flexible hybrid structure. All joints use frameless brushless torque motors with harmonic reduction drives and multi-dimensional force feedback sensors, enabling cobot-level human collaboration and predictive maintenance through joint wear monitoring. Walking payload reaches 15 kg.

Perception and sensor suite

For spatial awareness, the Walker S uses high-resolution RGBD cameras in a multi-eye stereo configuration, a 3D LiDAR for point cloud processing, and a 6-axis IMU combined with foot force sensors. This enables 6D pose recognition of complex objects with sub-millimetre grasping precision. An omnidirectional microphone array and speaker support natural voice interaction even in noisy production environments.

Software and AI architecture

The robot runs UBTECH's proprietary ROSA 2.0 OS on Ubuntu/Linux RT Preempt with full ROS 2 integration. Edge AI is handled by NVIDIA Jetson Orin (up to 275 TOPS). Autonomous navigation relies on U-SLAM for real-time 3D semantic mapping. Integration with the Baidu ERNIE multimodal LLM enables natural language command understanding and dynamic complex-task planning. Training is performed in NVIDIA Isaac Sim using reinforcement and imitation learning. An AIoT platform connects the robot to factory MES systems for real-time data synchronisation.

Applications and deployments

Walker S operates as an "intern" on EV assembly lines: quality inspection, seatbelt assembly verification, parts logistics and badge application. A landmark 2025 NVIDIA–Foxconn–UBTECH partnership deployed Walker S to assemble NVIDIA AI servers in Houston — described as "AI building AI." Additional pilot deployments cover aviation (Airbus) and express logistics (SF Express). The S-Series platform continues to evolve: Walker S Lite (140 cm, warehouse logistics), Walker S1 (172 cm, deployed at Geely), and Walker S2 (176 cm, 52 DOF, 3-minute hot-swap battery, 24/7 operation).