AIBRIEF
The top US reseller of Unitree's Chinese made humanoid and quadruped robots says task specific arms, not general purpose humanoids, are the right fit for most buyers.
RoboStore, the main North American distributor for Unitree Robotics, announced on August 10 that it will open a 66,000-square-foot commercial robot manufacturing facility on Long Island, New York by the first fiscal quarter of 2027.
The pivot runs under a new entity, Robo Inc., which will operate the manufacturing and systems integration business. Founder and CEO Teddy Haggerty said the team began contemplating its own production line about a year ago, informed by deployment work for customers.
RoboStore says it has sold and deployed more than 1,500 robots, with customers including Cisco, OpenAI, Nvidia, and over 150 universities. Robo Inc. is newly formed with no public revenue or operating history, so the factory opening is a forward bet rather than current capacity.
The move lands against a US "growing crackdown on foreign-made robots." The specific policy lever, whether tariffs, export controls, or procurement rules, is not detailed in Ars Technica's reporting.
In the same announcement, Haggerty argued that task-specific robotic arms, the kind sold by Standard Bots and Universal Robots, are a better fit for most businesses, and that general-purpose humanoids are usually the wrong purchase.