BOSHIAC / Harbin Institute of Technology

Harbin Boshi Automation Co., Ltd. (commonly known as BOSHIAC, Boshi, or in Chinese 博实股份; stock code: 002698.SZ) is a Chinese intelligent manufacturing and industrial automation company headquartered in Harbin, Heilongjiang, China. Founded in 1997 and publicly listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2012, the company specializes in intelligent manufacturing equipment, industrial robots, and smart factory solutions for chemical, petrochemical, metallurgy, and food industries. Since August 2023, BOSHIAC has worked with the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) under a strategic cooperation agreement to develop the DexBot humanoid robot, a hybrid dual-form platform that combines a humanoid upper body with either bipedal legs or a wheeled mobile base. The collaboration draws on HIT's State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, one of the earliest robotics research units in China, and is positioned by Chinese analysts as one of the country's fastest paths from academic prototype to A-share listed humanoid product.^[1][2][3]

History

Harbin Boshi Automation Co., Ltd. was founded in 1997 in the Harbin High-tech Industrial Development Zone. The company initially focused on post-processing automation equipment for solid materials in the petrochemical, coal chemical, and fertilizer industries.^[1]

In 2012, BOSHIAC was successfully listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange under stock code 002698, becoming one of China's publicly traded industrial automation companies.^[2]

The company has long-standing personal and institutional links to HIT. Its chairman Deng Xijun (邓喜军) and several other founders and executives, including Zhang Yuchun, Wang Chungang, and the late academician Cai Hegao (蔡鹤皋), all originated from HIT's Robotics Institute. Cai Hegao was a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a former director of the HIT Robot Research Institute. A wholly owned subsidiary of HIT was once the largest shareholder of BOSHIAC and as of 2023 still held about a 5 percent stake. These ties gave the firm an unusual amount of access to HIT's academic research pipeline.^[3]

On August 18, 2023, the company signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with HIT to jointly establish a humanoid robot key technology and prototype industrialization R&D project. Under the agreement BOSHIAC committed to provide 100 million yuan (approximately 14 million US dollars) of R&D funding over three years. Both parties agreed to share project results and intellectual property, with BOSHIAC receiving priority usage rights and industrial conversion rights to the resulting technology, including the right to set up subsidiaries built around individual subsystems.^[3][4]

The project moved from paper into hardware through 2024 and 2025. On December 30, 2025, HIT's School of Mechanical Engineering and BOSHIAC announced a joint stage milestone in which they unveiled a dual-form humanoid platform along with self-developed joint modules, two versions of a dexterous hand, and an in-house AI control stack called the Huazi-Rixin large model. Chinese press coverage described the result as the DexBot family of humanoid robots.^[5][6]

In separate investor communications in early 2025 and again in May 2025, BOSHIAC told the Shenzhen Stock Exchange that the humanoid robot project was still in the principle prototype debugging phase and that any decisions on full industrialization would depend on prototype performance, scenario fit, and cost analysis after testing concluded.^[7][8]

As of 2025, BOSHIAC reported approximately 4,919 employees and a market capitalization in the range of 2.6 billion US dollars, and continued to operate as a major player in China's industrial automation sector.^[2][9]

Founders and key personnel

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Fu Yili and Ni Fenglei lead the academic side of the partnership through HIT's State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems. Ni Fenglei holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from HIT and works on space robotics and robot control. Fu Yili's group at the School of Mechanical Engineering focuses on dexterous manipulation and surgical robotics. Both groups had been building humanoid subsystems for years before the BOSHIAC tie-up gave them a route to industrial scale-up.^[5][10]

Products

DexBot

The DexBot is a hybrid humanoid robot family developed jointly by BOSHIAC and HIT. The system is delivered in two body configurations that share most of the upper-body hardware: a bipedal version aimed at unstructured terrain (factory inspection, outdoor tasks, disaster response) and a wheeled version aimed at indoor service, transportation, and precision operations.^[5][6]

The bipedal walking platform documented in HIT academic papers has the following dimensions:

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A commercial press kit version released in late 2025 lists somewhat more aggressive specifications, including a peak running speed of 8.5 km/h and a vertical jump of 0.6 m, drawing on a hybrid hydraulic and electric actuation scheme.^[11][6]

DexBot features a versatile humanoid upper body mounted on either a bipedal lower body or a track-legged mobile platform. The robot's 56 active degrees of freedom and approximately 10 transformable configurations let it adapt to varied complex environments. The track-legged base enables traversal of rough terrain, stairs, and obstacles that are difficult for purely wheeled platforms.^[5]

Dexterous hands

BOSHIAC and HIT have built two distinct dexterous hand designs that ship with DexBot:

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Both hands use multi-finger configurations and combine dual encoders with torque sensors at the fingers. The high-performance variant is positioned for industrial assembly and tool handling, while the lightweight version is aimed at service-style manipulation. The hands are powered by high-torque custom electric actuators with a high power-to-weight ratio.^[5][6]

Joint modules

The team has developed multiple joint module families with what the announcement calls a high-load lightweight design. Rotational joints can carry a 5 kg load at 5 kg of self-weight, and the leg joints reach a peak torque of 400 Nm. Linear joints provide a maximum thrust of 10,000 N. The 7 degree-of-freedom hybrid manipulator on each arm is described as fully force-controlled at every joint.^[6]

Industrial automation products

Beyond the DexBot humanoid, BOSHIAC manufactures a broad range of industrial automation products:

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These products serve the petrochemical, coal chemical, salt chemical, fine chemical, fertilizer, metallurgy, logistics, food, beverage, pharmaceutical, photovoltaic, steel, rubber, and feed industries, with deployments across Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa.^[1][9]

Technology

DexBot integrates several advanced technologies from BOSHIAC's industrial expertise and HIT's robotics research:

• High-torque custom actuators. Custom electric (and in some announced configurations, hybrid electric and hydraulic) actuators with high power-to-weight ratios enable dynamic movement and heavy payload handling.^[5][6]
• Modular locomotion. The lower body can be reconfigured to switch between rolling and walking modes, sharing the same humanoid torso, arms, and head across the two product variants.^[5]
• Walking control framework. A 2025 paper from the HIT group proposed a position-based footstep planner built on the Linear Inverted Pendulum (LIP) model, combined with a hierarchical whole-body coordination controller. In simulation on the DexBot platform, this stack increased stable walking speed from 0.45 m/s to 0.9 m/s by synchronizing arm and waist motion with leg motion.^[10]
• Huazi-Rixin large model. A self-developed AI model that drives the 7-DOF arms and dexterous hands. It supports natural language interaction, task decomposition, multimodal perception across vision, force, and speech, and a model predictive control strategy for terrain stability.^[5]
• Sensing and computing stack. Each DexBot carries RGB and depth cameras roughly at 1080p resolution, Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, and a Linux-based industrial operating system with ROS compatibility, which makes it possible to drop the platform into existing factory networks without bespoke control hardware.^[11]

For cost reasons and as a matter of national policy, BOSHIAC has said it plans to complete the humanoid robot's core components in-house rather than buying them off the shelf, citing existing technology reserves from its industrial robot business and HIT's research pipeline as the basis for that decision.^[12]

Research

The DexBot platform serves as both a commercial industrial automation system and an academic research platform. Recent peer-reviewed publications from the HIT-led team include:

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The 2025 Frontiers paper was led by Xiangji Wang and Fusheng Zha at HIT, with Mantian Li at Shenzhen Polytechnic University as a corresponding author, and was published on February 21, 2025 (DOI 10.3389/fnbot.2025.1538979).^[10]

Reception and analyst view

Chinese sell-side analysts have described BOSHIAC as one of the rare A-share listed pure-play humanoid robot bodies, on the grounds that the firm intends to build the full humanoid platform in-house rather than supplying components to a third-party integrator. Coverage from securities research and tech-press outlets in 2023 and 2024 framed the HIT tie-up as a particularly fast academic-to-commercial path because the founders, the academic principals, and the laboratory infrastructure are already in the same city and the same alumni network.^[4][14]

At the same time, the company itself has consistently taken a cautious public posture about commercialization timing. In statements through 2024 and 2025 BOSHIAC reminded investors that the principle prototype was still being debugged and that decisions on mass production would depend on prototype performance and scenario economics, not on the press cycle.^[7][8] The December 30, 2025 demonstration of the dual-form platform, joint modules, and dexterous hands was billed by HIT and BOSHIAC as a stage achievement rather than a product launch.^[6]

Financial overview

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See also

• DexBot
• Harbin Institute of Technology
• Industrial robot
• Humanoid robot
• State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems
• Shenzhen Stock Exchange
• UBTech
• Unitree

References

1. Harbin Boshi Automation Co., Ltd. Official website. boshi.cn and en.boshi.cn. Retrieved 2026. ↩
2. PitchBook. "Harbin Boshi Automation Company 2025 Profile." pitchbook.com. ↩
3. Sina Finance. "Boshi shares (002698) event review: hand-in-hand with top institutions, humanoid robots are expected to accelerate industrialization." August 22, 2023. finance.sina.com.cn. ↩
4. Boshi Co., Ltd. "Announcement on signing a strategic cooperation framework agreement with HIT." Filed with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange via cninfo, August 2023. ↩
5. AIBase News. "Harbin Institute of Technology Collaborates with Bosi Corporation to Launch a Dual-Form Humanoid Robot! Self-Developed Huazi-Rixin Large Model Drives 7-Degree-of-Freedom Robotic Arm and High-Performance Dexterous Hand." December 30, 2025. news.aibase.com. ↩
6. DoNews. "HIT and Boshi shares jointly break through humanoid robot technology." December 30, 2025. donews.com. ↩
7. Daily Business News (NBD). "Boshi shares: the humanoid robot project jointly developed with HIT is still in principle prototype R&D." January 6, 2025. nbd.com.cn. ↩
8. Yicai. "Boshi shares: humanoid robot project jointly researched with HIT is still in the process of debugging principle prototype." May 21, 2025. yicai.com. ↩
9. Stock Analysis. "Harbin Boshi Automation (SHE: 002698) Company Profile." stockanalysis.com. ↩
10. Wang, X., Zha, F., Li, M., et al. "Walking control of humanoid robots based on improved footstep planner and whole-body coordination controller." Frontiers in Neurorobotics, Vol. 19, February 21, 2025. DOI 10.3389/fnbot.2025.1538979. ↩
11. Humanoid Guide. "DexBot Humanoid Robot, Industrial Automation Platform." humanoid.guide/product/dexbot/. ↩
12. STCN. "Boshi shares: humanoid robot core components planned to be completed independently, good technology reserves already in place." stcn.com/article/detail/966381.html. ↩
13. Shu et al. "A versatile humanoid robot platform for dexterous manipulation and human-robot collaboration." CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology, 2024. DOI 10.1049/cit2.12214. ↩
14. Sohu (citing Leaderobot). "Boshi shares and HIT cooperate on production, research, and talent to actively lay out humanoid robots." 2023. leaderobot.com/news/1658. ↩