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China has pulled far ahead in the race to build humanoid robots, issuing five times as many related patents as the United States over the past five years, Morgan Stanley said in its latest Robot Almanac.
In “Robot Almanac, Volume 3: Humanoids & Industrial Robots”, released on Tuesday as part of a six-volume series, Morgan Stanley said China recorded 7,705 humanoid patents over the past five years, compared with 1,561 in the US. Japan ranked next with 1,102, followed by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) with 1,100.
WIPO is a specialised United Nations agency based in Geneva that works to promote international cooperation on intellectual property.
The report was produced by the Morgan Stanley Global Embodied AI Team and listed 32 authors. The analysis also highlighted the cost advantage China brings to the humanoid robot supply chain.
Morgan Stanley estimated that developing a supply chain for Tesla’s Optimus Gen 2 would cost almost three times as much without China’s participation.
In a hypothetical “non-China supply chain”, the cost of actuators – the mechanisms that move joints – would rise from about US$22,000 to US$58,000, while chip and software costs would climb from roughly US$3,000 to US$7,000.
In total, the bill of materials for the Optimus Gen 2 would surge from around US$46,000 to US$131,000, the report said, with similar jumps across key hardware components including dexterous hands, feet, vision systems and batteries.
