Two-month-old startup's humanoid robot drives a go-kart at full speed on a real track

量子位 · wechat · 2026-08-23

A viral video shows a bipedal humanoid robot driving a go-kart at racing speed — steering, cornering and avoiding obstacles in one take — from a two-month-old startup called 共生知行 (Gongsheng Zhixing). Founder Ding Pengxiang, born in 1996, leads an all-PhD-student team born after 2000 that has won two Best Paper awards in embodied AI and built China's first embodied base model with 2K+ GitHub stars.

The team bets on a purely end-to-end approach, more radical than the layered brain/cerebellum design used by Figure: the model directly outputs joint targets, combining task behavior modeling with motion prior distillation (DriftDistill) so a single model handles both task intelligence and body stability, with a 1B MotionExpert and a ForceExpert for safe contact being distilled in. For data, their TrajBooster extracts end-effector trajectories from robot arms and lets humanoids track them in simulation to cheaply scale whole-body mobile manipulation data.

Ding is sober about timelines: 100K hours of data still yields lab demos only, and commercially meaningful scale likely requires millions of hours; the hardest open problems are how to combine perception and control and what data modality to use.

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