Robot Body Maker

A company that designs and manufactures a robot's complete physical hardware, such as a humanoid or quadruped maker.

“Embodiment” refers to a robot's physical body — its mechanical structure, joint motors, sensors, and onboard compute — and a “body maker” is a company that builds and sells the complete robot, often called a robot OEM in English (note that in Chinese, “OEM” usually implies contract manufacturing under someone else's brand, a different meaning). In the industry's supply chain, body makers sit in the middle, with upstream suppliers of reducers, motors, sensors, and other components below them and scenario owners and system integrators above. Unitree, UBTech, AgiBot, and Figure are all body makers in this sense. The contrasting category is a “brain company,” which builds only models and no hardware; some companies do both hardware and software in-house. When reading industry news or picking a research platform, it often helps to first work out whether a company is a body maker or a brain company.

ExampleUnitree Robotics sells complete robots such as the Go2 quadruped and the G1 humanoid, making it a classic robot body maker.

Also called

Robot OEM, Body Maker

Related

Embodiment · Robot-Brain (Model-Only) Company · Hardware-Software Integration · Upstream / Midstream / Downstream of the Industry Chain · Unitree Robotics · Core Components

Sources

Original equipment manufacturer - Wikipedia
Unitree Robotics 官网 (Chinese)