PNDbotics — full-size humanoid robots for industrial and service work

• 2023
  Founded
• Ningbo, China
  Headquarters
• Adam SP
  Latest flagship (2025)
• CITIC Goldstone
  Lead investor
• China
  Country
• Private
  Status

About PNDbotics

PNDbotics — legally PNDbotics (Ningbo) Co., Ltd. — was founded in September 2023 by David Yan (闫巡戈), the company's CEO, and Peter Cui (崔昊天), its CTO. Yan and Cui previously co-founded INNFOS in 2014 and were among the earliest teams in China to develop flexible, integrated robotic actuators — a discipline they had already been working on since 2011. A third co-founder and director, Zhang Zitao, holds a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, and previously served as a Global Partner at SoftBank Vision Fund and an investment director at Baidu.

The company is headquartered in Ningbo, Zhejiang, with additional R&D and operations offices in Beijing (Haidian District) and a smart-manufacturing center in Tianjin. From the outset, PNDbotics was positioned as a full-stack humanoid robotics company — meaning that the actuators, motor drives, whole-body control stack, embodied-AI algorithms, and full-machine integration are all developed in-house rather than sourced from external module vendors. That vertical integration is a direct outgrowth of the founders' fifteen years of prior work on quasi-direct-drive actuators.

PNDbotics went public with its work in July 2025, when it made a widely covered debut at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai. There, the company jointly unveiled its full-size humanoid, Adam, alongside a companion upper-body platform, Adam-U, designed for teleoperation and data collection. The Adam family expanded shortly after into an Adam Lite, Adam Standard, and Adam SP lineup, with the SP variant becoming the biomimetic, factory-oriented flagship. In early 2026, an Adam-family robot appeared on two major national broadcasts — CGTN's "2026 Super Night" and CCTV-1's "2026 Intangible Cultural Heritage Gala" — putting the platform in front of a live audience of hundreds of millions of viewers.

On the funding side, PNDbotics has moved quickly. Chinese financial press has reported that the company completed roughly seven rounds in its first two years, with backers including Wutong Capital, XVC (Xianfeng), Wanshi Capital, Ningbo Guanfu, and Zhenyan Investment. In early 2026 it announced a strategic round of several hundred million yuan led by CITIC Goldstone, the private-equity platform of CITIC Securities, with proceeds earmarked for precision-manufacturing equipment, expansion of its Ningbo smart-manufacturing center, and product delivery — a signal that the company is squarely focused on the transition from prototype to mass production. Its most obvious peers in the broader current AI boom in general-purpose robotics include Unitree Robotics, UBTECH Robotics, XPeng Robotics, LimX Dynamics, and Fourier Intelligence in China, and Figure AI, 1X, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, and Boston Dynamics globally.

Technology stack

PNDbotics has publicly framed itself as a full-stack humanoid company: the actuators, motor drives, whole-body controller, perception stack, and embodied-AI policies are all developed in-house. That vertical integration reflects the founders' long history in flexible integrated actuators, and it is the company's principal technical differentiator against integrator-style peers who assemble platforms from third-party joint modules.

Perception

Adam-family robots use a multi-camera vision system for situational awareness, supplemented by tactile feedback at the dexterous hands. On Adam-U, PNDbotics documents a ZED Mini stereo camera at the head; the mobile SP configurations use configurable RGB and depth cameras. The perception stack is used both for real-time closed-loop manipulation and to log motion-capture and teleoperation datasets for imitation-learning pipelines.

PND Smart Actuator (PSA) and control

The core mechanical building block is the PND Smart Actuator (PSA), a quasi-direct-drive module engineered to deliver hundreds of newton-meters of joint torque without a large gearbox. Reported figures put peak knee and hip torque at 340–360 N·m and maximum walking speed at up to 1.5 m/s. The control stack combines a self-developed Whole-Body Controller (WBC), model-predictive control, and deep reinforcement learning with imitation learning for gait, balance, and manipulation — the same broad family of techniques used across the current wave of RL-based humanoid platforms.

Actuators, power, and compute

Power delivery in Adam is entirely electric — no hydraulics — with the PSA modules driving every major joint. Adam-U carries a 1,172 Wh battery pack at up to 46.2 V and 25 A output; the bipedal SP configuration targets roughly two hours of active runtime under load. Onboard compute is split between an Intel NUC12WSKi7 for real-time motion control and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16 GB for perception and higher-level AI. Connectivity across the family includes Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, and wired Ethernet.

Power management is a particularly demanding subsystem for a humanoid of this class. Every PSA-class joint driver has to deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling, which pushes designs toward high-efficiency wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN) in the motor-driver stage and toward tightly matched precision passives on gate-drive and current-sense channels. The onboard battery pack integrates cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection ICs — subsystems whose reliability sets the practical ceiling on how long a humanoid platform can run between charges. MLCC capacitors are used in very high count across the DC bus and power-rail decoupling, and precision current-sense resistors are critical to the closed-loop torque control that makes the PSA modules back-drivable.

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 Adam-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers for the PSA quasi-direct-drive joints, high-torque servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, stereo and depth cameras, GPU compute boards such as the Jetson Orin NX class, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision resistors for current sensing, 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 integrator 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 — from PNDbotics and its Chinese peers to Figure AI, 1X, Apptronik, and Tesla globally — 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:

Trademark and affiliation notice. PNDbotics®, Adam, Adam Lite, Adam Standard, Adam SP, and Adam-U are trademarks of PNDbotics (Ningbo) Co., Ltd. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by PNDbotics (Ningbo) Co., Ltd. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.