Astribot — cable-driven AI robots for high-speed, high-precision manipulation
Astribot — legally Astribot (Shenzhen) Artificial Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd. and known in Chinese as Stardust Intelligence (星尘智能) — is a Shenzhen-based embodied-AI startup building AI-native, cable-driven humanoid robots. Its flagship Astribot S1, a mobile dual-arm platform with end-effector speeds above 10 m/s, has become one of the most-watched entrants in the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose AI boom, alongside 1X, Figure, and Sanctuary AI.
- Dec 2022Founded
- ShenzhenHeadquarters
- S1 & T1Latest flagships
- $1.4BSeries B valuation (2026)
- ChinaCountry
- UnicornStatus
About Astribot
Astribot was founded in December 2022 in Shenzhen by Lai Jie (来杰), a 16-plus-year robotics veteran who was the first employee of Tencent's Robotics X laboratory — where he led development of the wheel-legged robot Ollie — and who previously ran Baidu's Xiaodu Robot team. Lai and six former colleagues founded the company under the Chinese name Stardust Intelligence (星尘智能); the English name is drawn from the Latin phrase ad astra per aspera, "through hardship to the stars." From the beginning the company positioned itself around a single technical thesis — that AI-native robots need mechatronics designed for learning, not off-the-shelf industrial arms wrapped in software — and organized its team accordingly, with roughly half the staff on hardware and half on AI-driven perception and motion control, drawn from Tencent, Google, Huawei, DJI, and top research laboratories.
The company made its public debut at the 2024 World Robot Conference in Beijing with a viral demonstration of an early S1 prototype flipping pancakes, pouring wine, writing calligraphy, and pulling a tablecloth out from under stacked glassware — tasks pitched deliberately as evidence of speed and precision, not just legged locomotion. Unlike bipedal-first peers such as Tesla Optimus, Figure, or 1X NEO, Astribot chose a wheeled omnidirectional base with a humanoid upper body, arguing that manipulation — not walking — is the near-term bottleneck for commercially useful robots. That contrarian bet, combined with a proprietary cable-drive transmission that mimics human tendons, has made Astribot one of the most distinctive players in the current humanoid robotics wave.
Astribot's funding history has been dense and international. Yunqi Capital led the angel round in 2023 and has continued to invest through subsequent stages. In April 2025 the company closed consecutive Series A and A+ rounds totaling hundreds of millions of yuan, led by Jinqiu Capital and Ant Group, with continued participation from Yunqi Partners and Dalton Venture. In November 2025 a Series A++ round was co-led by CAS Capital and Ant Group, followed in June 2026 by a Series B exceeding 1 billion RMB that pushed the post-money valuation above 10 billion RMB (roughly $1.4 billion) and gave Astribot Chinese robotics unicorn status. New Series B participants included Thundersoft — a smart-cockpit and operating-system specialist — and Kede Education, alongside several regional investment funds.
The competitive landscape Astribot operates in includes 1X (NEO), Figure, Sanctuary AI, Tesla Optimus, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and — inside China — Unitree, UBTech, Fourier, and AgiBot. Astribot's differentiation is not physical scale but motion quality: publicly demonstrated end-effector speeds at or above 10 m/s and repeatability of ±0.1 mm, benchmarks that the company argues surpass an average adult male in both dimensions. The company also collaborates with Physical Intelligence (Pi) on foundation-model integration and with Tsinghua University on the CLAP video-learning framework, and it unveiled its own in-house robot foundation model, Lumo, in 2026.
Product lineup: Astribot S1 and Astribot T1
Astribot's public lineup as of 2026 consists of two robots — the manipulation-focused S1, which established the company's reputation with its 2024 viral demos, and the newer T1, a full-body cable-driven humanoid launched in May 2026 at a price aggressive enough to push high-dexterity humanoid robots below the 90,000 RMB threshold for the first time.
Astribot S1 (2024) — the viral bimanual manipulator
The S1 is a mobile dual-arm humanoid: a humanoid upper body mounted on a 3-DoF omnidirectional wheeled base, roughly 1.70 m tall, with two 7-DoF cable-driven arms, a 4-DoF articulated torso, parallel-jaw grippers, and a swappable lithium-ion battery pack rated at 4–6 hours of active runtime (up to about 10 hours in low-power standby, roughly 1.5 hours to full charge). Its end-effectors are the story: publicly demonstrated peak speeds of at least 10 m/s (about 36 km/h) with accelerations up to 100 m/s² and ±0.1 mm positioning repeatability, plus a 5 kg per-arm payload at full horizontal reach. Sensing includes 3D LiDAR, RGB-D depth cameras, an IMU, wrist and ankle force/torque sensors, and fingertip pressure sensors.
Astribot T1 (2026) — the full-body consumer-price humanoid
The T1 is Astribot's next-generation model, unveiled at the 2026 World Robotics Conference and launched from 89,900 RMB. It is a full 23-DoF cable-driven humanoid at approximately 1.55 m tall and 66 kg, with a 5 kg single-arm payload. Priced against a market where competing full-body humanoids typically sell for hundreds of thousands to more than a million RMB, the T1 is positioned as the platform that moves cable-driven AI robots from the research and pilot tier into a wider commercial and consumer-adjacent price bracket. It runs on Astribot's Lumo-2 foundation model, announced concurrently.
| Model | Year | Height | Weight | Payload | Battery | Actuators | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Astribot S1 | 2024 | ~1.70 m | Not disclosed | 5 kg / arm | 4–6 hr, swappable | Cable-driven, dual 7-DoF arms | ≥10 m/s end-effector; ±0.1 mm repeatability; wheeled base |
| Astribot T1 | 2026 | ~1.55 m | ~66 kg | 5 kg / arm | Not disclosed | Cable-driven, 23-DoF full body | From 89,900 RMB; Lumo-2 model; consumer-tier price |
Technology stack
Astribot describes its engineering approach as DFAI — Design for AI, meaning the mechanical body, high-bandwidth actuation, and software toolchain are engineered together as a single learning system rather than three loosely integrated subsystems. The company's signature choice is a proprietary cable-drive (绳驱) transmission that emulates human tendon-and-muscle actuation, moving heavy motors off the joints and toward the torso to reduce arm inertia — the same reasoning that lets a human arm reach 10 m/s tip speeds without a rigid industrial-arm's mass at every link.
Perception
Astribot robots use a multi-modal sensing stack: RGB and RGB-D cameras for scene understanding, 3D LiDAR for long-range spatial awareness and navigation, an IMU for balance and motion tracking, force/torque sensors at the wrists and ankles for contact-rich manipulation, and pressure sensors in the fingertips for delicate object handling. Ultrasonic sensors, a microphone array, and temperature sensors round out the environmental awareness that lets the robot avoid obstacles, accept voice commands, and monitor its own operating envelope.
Astribot Suite and DuoCore-WB
The AI stack — detailed in a peer-reviewed paper published in July 2025 — is called the Astribot Suite. A VR headset and handheld joysticks capture whole-body teleoperation demonstrations that map human hand poses directly to the robot's end-effectors; the resulting data trains an imitation-learning policy called DuoCore-WB that combines pre-trained vision encoders (compatible with DINOv2, CLIP, and SigLIP), end-effector-space control on SO(3), and a Real-Time Trajectory Generation module that solves a quadratic program online to smooth predicted actions into continuous execution. On six representative whole-body tasks — delivering drinks, storing items in cabinets, organizing shoes, discarding trash, picking scattered objects — the published Astribot Suite results report an 80% average success rate and 100% peak, with a large-language-model interface layered on top for natural-language task interaction. In 2026 Astribot unveiled Lumo (and Lumo-2), an in-house embodied foundation model that consolidates this stack into a single deployable model.
Actuators, power, and compute
Astribot uses cable-driven electric actuation throughout the arms and torso — no hydraulics — with torque-aware, high-bandwidth control loops designed for the whole-body imitation-learning pipeline. Each S1 carries a high-capacity swappable lithium-ion battery targeting 4–6 hours of active use, and onboard compute is provisioned for GPU-accelerated policy inference so that control loops close on the robot itself, not in the cloud.
Power delivery in a cable-driven humanoid of this class is unusually demanding. Motor drivers must push hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque through the tendon transmission with millisecond-scale response, which drives the use of wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN) in the gate-drive and inverter stages, precision current-sense resistors on every phase, and tightly matched MLCC decoupling capacitors at every power rail. The onboard battery pack in turn depends on battery-management ICs for cell balancing, thermal monitoring, and multi-stage protection — subsystems whose availability and lead time increasingly determine how fast a humanoid robotics program can move from engineering samples to fielded units.
Applications and commercial deployments
Astribot's stated markets are consumer-service humanoid robots and integrated bionic robots for research, eldercare, retail, media, and light industrial use. Limited commercial availability of the S1 began in China in late 2025, and the company reported thousand-level deliveries by the end of that year — early but real manufacturing traction relative to most humanoid peers.
- JD.com, CCTV, and Shenzhen nursing homes. Named partners and deployment settings for the S1 span retail (JD.com), media production (CCTV), and eldercare (nursing-home pilots in Shenzhen) — a deliberately diverse mix aimed at demonstrating the same platform across service, media, and care use cases.
- SEER Robotics — industrial intelligent agents. In September 2025 Astribot announced what Yunqi Capital described as one of the year's first thousand-unit commercial orders for humanoid robots in Chinese industry, launched in partnership with industrial-automation integrator SEER Robotics to build AI-robot "industrial intelligent agents" for factory floors and warehousing.
- Thundersoft — automotive intelligent cockpit. A 2026 strategic partnership targets integration of Astribot's robots and AI stack into automotive cockpit and vehicle-adjacent service scenarios, alongside Thundersoft's smart-cockpit operating-system business.
- Yangzhou embodied-AI center and vocational education. Collaborations with municipal authorities in Yangzhou to establish an embodied-AI center, and investments in vocational education programs, extend the deployment footprint into public-sector and workforce-development pilots.
- International rollout. Astribot has stated the S1's international rollout is scaling through 2026, with early availability tracked across markets including the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Australia, and India.
The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in
A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single Astribot-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers, high-torque servo modules for cable-drive tendon actuation, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision current-sense resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.
Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-integration teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams — Astribot, 1X, Figure, Sanctuary AI, Tesla, Apptronik, Unitree, UBTech, Fourier, AgiBot, and others — are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.
Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:
Obsolete and end-of-life parts
Legacy semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives that are no longer in mainstream distribution — the parts that keep older platforms running during transitions to newer hardware, and the long-tail items that block a BOM from closing.
Allocated and hard-to-find active parts
High-torque BLDC motor drivers, IMUs and MEMS sensors, SiC/GaN power devices, GPU compute modules, precision resistors, and MLCC capacitors caught in allocation or long-lead times. Send us a BOM or a shortage list — we'll confirm what we can source and at what lead time.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Astribot?
Astribot (Stardust Intelligence, 星尘智能) was founded in December 2022 in Shenzhen by Lai Jie (来杰), a 16-plus-year robotics veteran who was the first employee of Tencent's Robotics X laboratory and who previously led Baidu's Xiaodu Robot team. Lai remains founder and CEO. Co-founder Dai Yuan and six former Tencent-and-Baidu colleagues joined at founding.
What is the Astribot S1?
The Astribot S1 is a mobile dual-arm humanoid robot with two 7-DoF cable-driven arms, an end-effector speed of at least 10 m/s, ±0.1 mm positioning repeatability, 5 kg payload per arm at full horizontal reach, a 4-DoF articulated torso, and a 3-DoF omnidirectional wheeled base. It is not a bipedal humanoid — Astribot's technical bet is that manipulation speed and dexterity, not legged locomotion, is the near-term bottleneck for commercially useful general-purpose robots.
Where are Astribot robots deployed commercially?
Astribot began limited commercial availability of the S1 in China in late 2025 and reached thousand-level deliveries by the end of that year. Reported deployment sectors include research, eldercare, retail, and media, with named partners including JD.com, CCTV, and Shenzhen nursing homes, plus a thousand-unit-scale industrial partnership with SEER Robotics announced in September 2025 and an automotive-cockpit partnership with Thundersoft in 2026.
How much has Astribot raised?
Astribot has raised across angel (2023, led by Yunqi Capital), Pre-A, Series A and A+ (April 2025, led by Jinqiu Capital and Ant Group), Series A++ (November 2025, co-led by CAS Capital and Ant Group), and Series B (June 2026) exceeding 1 billion RMB. The Series B pushed post-money valuation above 10 billion RMB — roughly $1.4 billion — giving Astribot Chinese robotics unicorn status.
Is Hybrid Electronics affiliated with Astribot?
No. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company. We are not a distributor, reseller, or partner of Astribot. All trademarks are property of their respective owners. Hybrid supports robotics developers by sourcing obsolete, allocated, and hard-to-find semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives for R&D, prototype, and low-volume production builds.
Can Hybrid help with components for humanoid robotics builds?
Yes. We regularly support R&D and integrator teams with hard-to-find semiconductors, BLDC motor-driver ICs, IMUs and other MEMS sensors, connectors, SiC/GaN power devices, and precision passives for the industrial and embedded boards used in robotics platforms. Send us a BOM or a short list of shortages and we'll confirm availability and pricing.
Trademark and affiliation notice. Astribot®, Stardust Intelligence, 星尘智能, Astribot S1, Astribot T1, Astribot Suite, DuoCore-WB, and Lumo are trademarks of Astribot (Shenzhen) Artificial Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Astribot (Shenzhen) Artificial Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.