- Hangzhou startup showcased its Cyberling as China’s quadruped race shifts toward real-world deployment
- The debut highlights intensifying competition beyond acrobatics, with vendors racing to prove commercial value
Hangzhou-based AI and robotics company Uniubi AI (宇泛智能) unveiled its first fully self-developed quadruped robot, Cyberling (灵猫), at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).
The startup claimed it is the world’s first four-legged robot capable of completing a continuous 720-degree backflip.
Fifteen Cyberling robots performed simultaneously across two WAIC venues in Shanghai, demonstrating a series of highly challenging movements including continuous 720-degree backflips, side flips and synchronized group choreography.
Significantly high demands
Unlike a conventional backflip, a 720-degree rotation requires the robot to complete two full spins within nearly the same airtime while maintaining precise landing control.
According to Ubiuni, this sequence of movements places significantly high demands on joint responsiveness, explosive power and motion-planning algorithms.
Cyberling adopts a heterogeneous dual-brain architecture, with a high-level AI system responsible for decision-making and a low-level controller handling millisecond-scale motion control. The robot is powered by Nvidia’s Orin computing platform.
The robot has a payload-to-weight ratio of 1.3:1, can carry dynamic loads of up to 20 kilograms and operates for up to 5.5 hours on a 432Wh battery.
From stunts to practical work
Quadruped robots are increasingly being evaluated by what they can accomplish outside exhibition halls rather than by their acrobatic abilities alone.
More than 200 embodied AI companies and over 300 physical robots participated in this year’s WAIC, up sharply from about 80 exhibitors a year earlier, reflecting the industry’s transition from technology demonstrations to commercial deployment.
Uniubi founder Zhao Hongyi (赵弘毅), whose company was founded in 2014 as an AI computer vision developer, said at the conference that robots are moving “from exhibition floors to industry.”
The robot’s payload capacity suggests potential applications in logistics, industrial inspection and emergency response, where mobility and load-bearing ability matter as much as agility.
Commercialization remains the real test
Cyberling’s acrobatic debut highlights China’s growing expertise in high-speed motion control, dynamic balancing and multi-robot coordination.
But spectacular demonstrations alone are unlikely to determine market leadership.
China’s quadruped robotics market is already led by companies with proven commercial traction.
Consumer-focused Unitree (宇树科技) and industrial specialist DEEP Robotics (云深处科技) — both based in Hangzhou — have built competitive advantages through large-scale deployments, accumulated operational data and mature manufacturing capabilities.
Uniubi’s more plausible opportunity may lie in leveraging its decade-long experience in AI-powered security and smart-city technologies to develop robots for inspection and public safety, rather than competing head-on in consumer robotics or established industrial sectors.
Whether that strategy succeeds will depend less on how many flips Cyberling can perform than on whether it can translate technical capability into repeatable commercial deployments before the competitive window narrows.
