On Wednesday 19 August 2026, Unitree Robotics (legal name Yushu Technology Co. Ltd.) started trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market as 688836.SH. The Associated Press reported the offer at 150.80 yuan a share, proceeds of about 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million), an opening pop as high as 629 percent, and a close at 845 yuan, up 460 percent. That same afternoon, at the World Robot Conference in Beijing, a G1 stood at a ping-pong table, stepped sideways, and returned a backhand. Xinhua filed the coincidence. It is not a branding accident. The listing prices a company whose published advantage is still motors, reduction, and motion control. The booth is what those joints look like when a ball is in the air.
Most humanoid programs still treat actuator data as a trade secret. Unitree does not, at least not for the G1 and H1. The official G1 page lists 23 joint motors on the base machine and 23 to 43 on G1 EDU, low-inertia high-speed internal-rotor PMSMs, industrial crossed-roller bearings, dual encoders, local air cooling, and a maximum knee torque of 90 N·m on G1 / 120 N·m on G1 EDU. Arm payload is about 2 kg, or 3 kg on EDU, with the usual posture caveat. The robot stands 1,320 mm and weighs about 35 kg with battery. Those are not inferred from a teaser video. They are on the product table.
A table-tennis return is a nasty closed loop. The incoming ball’s flight time is a fraction of a second. Depth camera and 3D LiDAR have to lock a trajectory. The planner has to pick forehand, backhand, or a step-then-hit. Then the hips, knees, and ankles have to move a 35 kg machine laterally without dumping the center of mass, while a 5-DoF arm (plus optional wrist and Dex3-1 fingers on EDU) puts the paddle on a moving point. Dual encoders matter here. One encoder on the motor, one after the reduction, is how you tell commanded rotor angle from actual joint angle when the gearbox winds up. Crossed-roller bearings take the moment load so the knee does not chew itself when the robot plants a foot and rotates the torso. Local air cooling is the unglamorous limit: 90 N·m is a peak number. Hold a squat or a rapid lateral shuffle and you are in continuous-torque and thermal-derate territory, which Unitree does not publish as a curve.
Boxing at the same booth is a different joint problem. Fighting motions, as Robots Daily put it after talking to Unitree staff, need dynamic balance and whole-body coordination. Translation: each impact or feint is a disturbance rejection test at the hip (G1 hip travel is listed as P±154°, R−30° to +170°, Y±158°) and at the knee (0–165°). The H2, Unitree’s newer full-size humanoid, stood nearby in a fighting stance. The official H2 datasheet is still thinner than G1/H1. For peak-torque context, the older H1 page is the one with numbers: knee about 360 N·m, hip about 220 N·m, ankle about 59 N·m on H1, arm joints about 75 N·m. H1-2 adds a 27-DoF table, 120 N·m shoulder and elbow peaks, and a rated arm load of about 7 kg. That is the torque class you need if a full-size machine is going to catch itself after a missed punch without folding the stance knee.
The swarm demo is easy to over-read. Multiple G1s moved with As2, As2-W, A2 and A2-W quadrupeds and wheeled-legged machines under what Unitree called an in-house AI swarm control system. Staff told Robots Daily the point was one command set across different morphologies, not a single virtuoso robot. That is a coordination and time-sync problem more than a new actuator. It does not prove a factory fleet. It does show that Unitree is treating the joint controllers as a product family with a common command layer. Same company also rolled out the GD01, a roughly 3-meter, ~500 kg (with rider) transforming mecha that Unitree says uses its own servo drive and control code to switch biped and quadruped configurations. Treat that as a showpiece unless you have field hours. The G1’s published joint stack is the part I would actually design around.
The IPO numbers sit next to those joints, not above them. TechNode, working from the listing record, says quadruped revenue grew from 92.82 million yuan in 2022 to 698 million yuan in 2025. Humanoid revenue was 2.96 million yuan in 2023 and 868 million yuan in 2025, more than 51 percent of the company. Total 2025 revenue: 1.699 billion yuan. Net profit attributable to shareholders: 278 million yuan. BBC independently repeats the 278 million yuan profit and the 5,500-plus humanoid shipments in 2025. The Insight, also 19 August, quotes 1.699 billion yuan revenue and 590 million yuan adjusted net profit, plus a 60.13 percent gross margin. Those two profit figures are not the same metric. Use 278 million as the attributable number and 590 million only if you label it adjusted.
The Insight’s more useful line is the customer mix. For January–September 2025, 73.6 percent of humanoid revenue came from research and education. Consumer and commercial: 17.4 percent. Industry: 9 percent. Inside that industrial slice, only 29.3 percent was clearly manufacturing or inspection. First-quarter 2026 revenue was up 68.5 percent year on year; adjusted net profit was down 52.6 percent. That is what a public tape will keep asking. Shipping thousands of 35 kg machines into labs is not the same as a knee module that holds a factory cycle.
Liquidity explains part of the first-day price. The Insight says only 7.44 percent of shares were freely tradable, the rest locked. Open at 1,100 yuan (444.9 billion yuan, about $66 billion), then a slide toward 895 yuan; first-day range 1,100 to 882. AP’s close is 845. Strategic names in the 20 percent placement, per The Insight: social security fund, DeepSeek, Tencent, PetroChina. Online lottery winning rate: 0.0181 percent, a STAR record low, on 9.78 million retail subscribers. More than 85 percent of proceeds, The Insight says, are aimed at R&D, much of it the “brain” Unitree started funding in earnest only in 2024 (UnifoLM-WMA-0 and UnifoLM-VLA-0). TechNode’s read is the same: a decade of mechanical design, motors, and motion control, and a still-open question on embodied models. Wang told WRC attendees, as quoted by HNGN on 22 August, that the company is “marching towards a ‘ChatGPT moment’ in embodied intelligence.” That is a claim, not a measurement.
Two constraints belong in the same paragraph as the 13 percent US revenue figure AP cites for last year. In July the US FCC banned imports of new foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots. AP says Unitree told investors the ban applies to its new models; existing models can still be sold, with the risk of a wider restriction later. Kyodo, covering WRC’s opening day, noted there were no foreign exhibitors despite the conference’s name, and organizers claimed around 3,000 products across five days (19–23 August). AP’s WRC figure is “more than 300 exhibitors.” Products and exhibitors are different counts. Do not mash them.
Verified: listing date, ticker, offer price, proceeds, open/close, 2025 revenue and attributable profit, G1/H1 joint hardware as published by Unitree, WRC date and the G1 ping-pong / boxing / mixed-form booth as reported by Xinhua, Kyodo, and Robots Daily, research-heavy revenue mix from The Insight.
Unknown or not on the pages: production yield and field failure rates on those PMSM modules; continuous torque and thermal maps; whether the ping-pong stack is onboard autonomy or a tightly scripted perception pipeline with a human-safe ball speed; H2 actuator table; any Unitree factory deployment with published cycle time and uptime this week. Robots Daily’s “more than 90 percent of core components developed and produced in-house” is a company claim, not a teardown.
FIRGELLI already publishes a 2025 actuator map that lists the G1 PMSM stack. This is not that article. This is the week the same hardware company became a public stock, on the same day it asked a 90 N·m knee to shuffle under a ping-pong ball. Electric linear actuators still belong on the fixture and lift side of that problem — part presentation, test stands, battery-swap jigs — not inside Unitree’s rotary joints. The listing does not change the physics. It just means the next missed shipment or warranty spike will have a ticker.