PNDbotics Adam Lite

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.

History and launch

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.

Design and hardware

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.

Software and AI

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.

Manufacturer

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.

Price and availability

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

Sources

1. Whole-body Humanoid Robot Locomotion with Human Reference, arXiv (Zhang et al., HKUST-GZ and PNDbotics) (2024-02-28)
2. China's humanoid robot walks like a human, Interesting Engineering (2025-04-28)
3. Adam, the bot that moves its pelvis better than a human, Inspenet (2024-09-09)
4. Seeds | PNDbotics Raises Hundreds of Millions of Yuan, Gasgoo (2026-02-27)

Updated: 2026-10-10

Compared with the catalogue

• At 160 cm the PNDbotics Adam Lite is taller than 19% of the humanoids in the catalogue (median: 170 cm).
• It has 25 degrees of freedom against a catalogue median of 28; more degrees of freedom usually means finer arm and hand movement.
• Its weight of 60 kg (catalogue median: 65 kg) matters for transport and for working around people.
• It is one of 2 PNDbotics models in the catalogue and one of 128 humanoids from China.

Capabilities