{"id":"pndbotics-adam","manufacturer":"PNDbotics","model":"Adam Lite","country":"CN","description":"Adam Lite is the base version of the Adam bipedal humanoid from China's PNDbotics. It is 1.6 m tall, weighs 60 kg and uses 25 quasi-direct-drive (QDD) actuators, and it is used mainly for research into locomotion learned through reinforcement learning and imitation of human motion.","catalog_status":"in-development","specifications":{"height_cm":160,"weight_kg":60,"payload_kg":null,"dof":25,"speed_ms":null,"battery_h":null},"capabilities":["sort","obstacle"],"source":{"url":"https://www.pndbotics.com","verified_at":null,"verified_fields":[],"review_status":"requires_current_source_check"},"evidence":{"manufacturer_review":null,"mera_field_test":{"status":"not_published","report_url":null,"measured_at":null},"verification_note":"A manufacturer documentation check does not verify field performance, inventory or MERA compatibility."},"knowledge":{"summary":"Adam Lite is the base version of the Adam bipedal humanoid from China's PNDbotics. It is 1.6 m tall, weighs 60 kg and uses 25 quasi-direct-drive (QDD) actuators, and it is used mainly for research into locomotion learned through reinforcement learning and imitation of human motion.","sections":[{"h":"History and launch","p":["PNDbotics started refining Adam's core components in June 2023. In February 2024 a team from PNDbotics and HKUST (Guangzhou) posted an arXiv paper on humanoid walking learned from human motion data, with experiments run on Adam (Lite).","According to Inspenet, the first production batch of Adam was completed in the first half of 2024. The company has since added full-size versions with hands and the Adam-U data-collection robot to the family."]},{"h":"Design and hardware","p":["The arXiv paper lists Adam (Lite) at 1.6 m and 60 kg with 25 degrees of freedom: per leg 3 at the hip, 1 at the knee and 2 at the ankle, per arm 3 at the shoulder and 2 at the elbow, plus 3 in the waist. Every joint uses force-controlled PND QDD actuators, and the highly back-drivable leg units reach 340 Nm (later material quotes 360 Nm).","The hip and pelvis are modelled on the human skeleton. Control runs on a 12th-gen Intel i7 NUC, while the PND RCU ties together actuators, battery management and power through a 16-port gigabit switch on the real-time PDN network. Dexterous hands and a vision module are optional."]},{"h":"Software and AI","p":["Adam's gait is trained with reinforcement learning in parallel simulation (including NVIDIA Isaac Gym). The 2024 paper added imitation learning with an adversarial motion prior based on human motion capture, which the authors describe as the first use of human locomotion data for imitation learning on a full-size humanoid. The work focused on blind walking without cameras."]},{"h":"Manufacturer","p":["PNDbotics was founded in 2023 and builds its own actuators, encoders, reducers and control electronics. It has production sites in Tianjin and Ningbo, and says its Tianjin centre can build hundreds of humanoids a year. In February 2026 it announced a funding round of several hundred million yuan led by CITIC Goldstone."]},{"h":"Price and availability","p":["PNDbotics does not publish Adam pricing and takes orders directly."]}],"timeline":[["2023-06","Work on Adam's core components begins"],["2024-02","arXiv paper on Adam (Lite) locomotion learned from human motion"],["2024","First Adam production batch"],["2026-02","Funding round led by CITIC Goldstone"]],"faq":[["How much does Adam Lite weigh?","60 kg at 1.6 m tall."],["How many degrees of freedom does Adam Lite have?","25: 6 per leg, 5 per arm and 3 in the waist."],["Does Adam Lite have hands?","Not in the base version; dexterous hands and vision are optional."],["What does PNDbotics Adam cost?","PNDbotics does not publish a price."]],"sources":[{"title":"Whole-body Humanoid Robot Locomotion with Human Reference","publisher":"arXiv (Zhang et al., HKUST-GZ and PNDbotics)","url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18294","date":"2024-02-28"},{"title":"China's humanoid robot walks like a human","publisher":"Interesting Engineering","url":"https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/chinas-humanoid-robot-walks-like-human","date":"2025-04-28"},{"title":"Adam, the bot that moves its pelvis better than a human","publisher":"Inspenet","url":"https://inspenet.com/en/news/adam-the-bot-moves-pelvis-better-than-human/","date":"2024-09-09"},{"title":"Seeds | PNDbotics Raises Hundreds of Millions of Yuan","publisher":"Gasgoo","url":"https://autonews.gasgoo.com/articles/market-industry/seeds-pndbotics-raises-hundreds-of-millions-of-yuan-2027982216695410689","date":"2026-02-27"}],"updated":"2026-10-10"},"mera":{"rental_with_operator":false,"sale_in_offer":false,"availability":"confirmation_required","shop_url":null},"url":"https://merarobotics.com/blog/humanoids/pndbotics-adam","inquiry_url":"https://merarobotics.com/en/start?service=purchase&robot=pndbotics-adam"}