Why this self-driving vehicle veteran joined a legged robotics startup

Zhang LiHis career path sounded like a bellwether for China’s tech trends. When the Cisco veteran joined WeRide in 2018, the Chinese autonomous vehicle company was less than a year old. Over the next few years, the country would become a breeding ground for three AV unicorns, including WeRide, whose valuation rose to 4.4 billion dollars last year.

Zhang’s resignation from WeRide in June, three months after the company confidentially filed for an IPO, surprised some people. But as we learned about his next step, it became clear that his decision was driven by his ambition to work on the “next big thing.”

WeRide’s former chief operating officer has joined LimX Dynamics, a Shenzhen-based robotics startup, as its co-founder and CEO. Zhang will primarily focus on business strategy and operations, channel development, marketing and communications, and government relations, both domestically and internationally.

The timing, again, seems fortuitous. Just last week, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology was released a nine-page plan that outlined the country’s goal of mass-producing humanoid robots by 2025. Such top-level guidelines have historically helped attract talent and capital to a new technology field.

After five years in the AV industry, Zhang felt an urge to move on. Again, he was looking for a startup to join and had two criteria in mind: first, it must have proprietary, cutting-edge technology. Second, it should be able to attract significant capital.

LimX Dynamics was his answer. Founded by a team of robotics scientists, the startup has already raised 200 million yuan ($27.5 million) in angel and pre-A funding. Along with Zhang’s hiring today, the startup is also appointing Dr. Jia Pan, assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, as its lead scientist.

“My strength lies in working with entrepreneurial scientists and companies where technology and business grow hand in hand,” Zhang told TechCrunch in an interview. Having helped WeRide find product market adoption and scale robotaxi operations in China, Zhang seems like an ideal candidate for the startup working on legged robots, a relatively nascent type of mobile robot that uses mechanical legs to move.

From smart driving to humanoids

The birth of Optimus has sparked widespread debate about the similarities between robots and automated or autonomous driving. When Tesla introduced the humanoid robot last year, it highlighted the ties between the two areas. As my colleague Darrell reported at the time:

Think about it. We just move from the wheels to our feet,” explained one of the company’s engineers. “So some of the ingredients are quite similar [ … ] It’s exactly the same occupancy network. Now we’ll talk a little more detail later with the Autopilot team [ … ] The only thing that has really changed is the training data.

Echoing the observation, Zhang said the transition to the new job will likely be smooth, thanks to the transferability of his knowledge and skills from self-driving.

“It is clear that like autonomous vehicles, legged robots also use SLAM [Simultaneous Localization and Mapping]. But as I delved deeper into the two fields, I realized that they have many other similarities. Today, most households own one or two cars, but in the future, they may have one or more robots to perform household tasks. Like self-driving vehicles, robots face the problem of getting from point A to point B.”

But as Darrell also pointed out, the similarities may be an oversimplification:

The domain expertise, although reduced to a simple translation from Tesla’s presentation, is in reality quite complicated. Bipedal robots navigating pedestrian paths are a very different beast than autonomous vehicle paths, and oversimplifying the connection does a disservice to the vast existing body of research and development work on the subject.

It’s too early to tell where biped and quadruped robots will find mass adoption. LimX Dynamics is currently testing a prototype for industrial inspection use, with the intention of bringing its robots to car manufacturing, logistics and home services.

“The inspection is not smart at all, but my job is to look for cases that are not even conceivable today,” the executive said. “If you think of robots as a device with an operating system, then there’s a lot of room for imagination.”

After years of frenzied investment and hiring, the AV industry’s path to significant revenue remains unclear in both China and the U.S. Will legged robots suffer a similar fate? Zhang expressed his wish for a better result.

“Hopefully the robotics industry won’t move forward without being able to land like self-driving.”

Fixed Zhang’s title on WeRide on November 7, 2023.