PNDbotics

PNDbotics (Pandong Robotics) is a Beijing startup founded in 2023 that sells full-size research humanoids rather than chasing factory contracts. Its distinguishing feature is a set of in-house quasi-direct-drive actuators with force control, which give its Adam robots a noticeably natural walking gait; the first Adam Lite, 1.6 m and about 60 kg with 25 such actuators, appeared in 2023.

The current flagship is Adam SP: 1.67 m, 62 kg, up to 44 degrees of freedom, 340 to 360 Nm peak joint torque, five-fingered hands and a payload of roughly 5 kg, listed online at about USD 100,000 as a prototype. In July 2025 the company had an Adam play a keytar on stage at the VOYAGEX music festival in Changchun, a pre-programmed and supervised routine. The first configuration to ship in volume is Adam-U, a legless, height-adjustable upper-body platform (31 degrees of freedom, 61 kg) built with motion-capture firm Noitom and hand maker Inspire for data collection and manipulation training, priced from USD 45,000 with pre-orders from September 2025.

PNDbotics has published no customer list, unit count, revenue or funding, and its founders are not named in the sources consulted. It is a small hardware supplier to the research and data-collection market, with an open SDK, and should be judged on that basis.