At the 2026 Aggregated Intelligence Industry Development Conference, held on September 9th in Wuhan's Optics Valley and co-hosted by the Aggregated Intelligence Industry Innovation Center and Hubei Science & Technology Investment, Vbot co-founder and product president Zhao Zhelun shared his insights on the current state of quadruped robotics.

Over the past decade, numerous research institutions and companies have persistently explored ways to bring quadruped robots into the consumer home market, resulting in products like the Unitree Go2, Xiaomi's CyberDog, and Sony's Aibo. However, Zhao pointed out that these robot dogs still exhibit notable shortcomings when deployed in real-world scenarios.

"Sony's Aibo excels in interaction capabilities but lacks in mobility; while Unitree's offerings possess strong locomotion but are primarily geared toward research settings, with a focus on remote control and secondary development," Zhao explained. He noted that his team's core members bring autonomous driving expertise from Li Auto and Horizon Robotics, and aim to infuse consumer-grade robot dogs with edge AI and autonomous driving technologies.

"We're building a consumer robot dog that can genuinely function in daily life, with complete capabilities: autonomous environmental perception, understanding, path planning, and intelligent decision-making, culminating in self-directed action execution. This addresses the gap in autonomous intelligence that previous consumer quadruped products have struggled with," he said.

Zhao emphasized that successful commercialization provides the training infrastructure for embodied intelligence. The contrast between limited lab operations of just one to five units and real-world deployments exceeding 1,000 or 2,000 units creates fundamentally different learning loops.

"A sustainable product loop must stem from a complete commercial-technological cycle. This means moving from genuine user needs, to product definition, to robot deployment, to real user interaction, to actual data generation and system iteration, and finally back to user value. This drives greater product adoption and business opportunities. Only through this comprehensive embodied intelligence product-technology-commerce cycle can we achieve long-term value and sustainability," he concluded.