On a frozen Earth facing destruction, rescuers in mechanical exoskeletons carry flints through the snow. The powered frames help them lift heavy weapons, drag fallen teammates, and push a planetary engine’s firing pin into place to complete their mission.
The film The Wandering Earth helped establish that image of exoskeletons in the public imagination. For Xu Zhenhua, founder of ULS Robotics, the film also offered an opportunity to reach a wider audience, according to 36Kr.
Xu began in automotive electronics and also worked on medical rehabilitation robots. He then spent eight years with his team developing industrial exoskeletons. ULS Robotics’ revenue exceeded RMB 100 million (USD 14.9 million) in 2025, and it has raised a nine-figure RMB sum from investors including Unity Ventures, Future Capital, and K2VC. This year, it launched the consumer exoskeleton Viatrix X.
With other companies in the sector already valued in the billions of RMB, ULS appeared to be entering the consumer market late. It had even chosen to slow its early fundraising.
Xu was in no rush. In his view, a consumer exoskeleton must balance battery life, weight, heat, comfort, and power output. Finding what he calls an “extremely demanding balance” matters more than getting an unfinished product to market.
While competitors raced to establish an early lead, ULS used the time to rethink its positioning and develop a more distinctive product. It spent more than two years developing its own drive system and floating hip joint architecture for outdoor use.
The device is aimed at office workers who want help navigating demanding mountain terrain. Xu believes that, for a product whose appeal depends so heavily on how it feels to wear, lasting demand will come from engineering that works in practice.
Bringing automotive engineering to a wearable machine
An exoskeleton is a machine worn directly on the body. Wearers immediately feel any weakness in its performance. A device that falls short of its promises can quickly end up unused in a corner.
Improving one specification rarely improves the whole device. More assistance typically requires a larger motor and more power, increasing weight and heat. Longer battery life calls for a larger battery, but weight is a strict constraint for a wearable device. Faster responses require more computing power, which also consumes energy and generates heat. The industry is still working through those tradeoffs.
“Exoskeletons have long been stuck in a competition over specifications. Pushing an individual measure to its limit still has value, but as specifications improve, the marginal returns diminish. In the end, the competition is about the ability to integrate an entire engineering system,” Xu, ULS Robotics’ founder and CEO, told 36Kr.
Viatrix X puts that approach to the test. The motor and drive architecture underpin an exoskeleton’s assistance, battery life, weight, and thermal stability. ULS therefore began by redesigning power delivery and heat management.
Higher output generally produces more heat, but users will not tolerate a hot machine strapped to their legs. The R&D team addressed heat in the motor’s design rather than relying on added cooling hardware to dissipate it.
Its in-house drive system uses flat wire windings, a design widely used in the automotive industry.
According to 36Kr, conventional round wire windings have a slot fill factor of about 78.5%, a measure of how much of the available space the wire occupies. ULS said its flat-wire design achieves 97%, packing more copper into the same space to reduce resistance and heat.
The company says this automotive-grade technology improves Viatrix X’s overall efficiency by 20–30%, allowing it to provide more assistance with less heat in a limited space. The aim is to reduce the discomfort of wearing a warm device against the body.
The efficiency gains also help shrink the product. Viatrix X is 40% smaller by volume than the previous generation, according to the company. Its listed weight is 2.58 kilograms, excluding the battery.
The hardware determines the device’s capabilities. Its control algorithms determine when and how to use them.
ULS developed an automatic energy management system that adjusts the maximum assistance available based on the battery’s remaining charge. Its “Boost” mode provides the strongest assistance for climbing, carrying loads, or short periods of strenuous walking, but also consumes the most power.
According to 36Kr, the system allows full Boost output when the battery is fully charged. Below 75%, it progressively lowers the assistance ceiling. Below 25%, it disables Boost and its highest level of assistance. Below 10%, only basic walking assistance remains.
The system is intended to protect the battery while following the pacing principle hikers use to conserve their strength over a long walk.
People generally do not begin a hike at a full sprint. They adjust their effort to the terrain. The energy management system is designed to work with that rhythm, reducing the risk of the battery running out midway through a walk while keeping assistance available when needed.
Timing matters as much as the amount of power delivered. Lifting a leg, swinging it forward, landing, and pushing off require different interventions within the gait cycle.
The report puts human reaction time to touch at roughly 120–200 milliseconds. If an exoskeleton responds too slowly, it cannot keep pace with the wearer’s movements. Assistance arrives at the wrong moment, creating a dragging sensation rather than helping.
ULS said Viatrix X uses an automotive-grade gait recognition chip and an adaptive artificial intelligence algorithm with a response time of 0.5–1.0 milliseconds. The system is intended to follow the wearer’s rhythm and scale its assistance to the length of each step.
“The purpose of exoskeleton assistance is not to replace people, but to supplement them. Human movement is a continuous process of ‘intention, exertion, and adjustment.’ To become part of that process, the device must answer two questions at once: how much assistance to provide, and when to provide it,” Xu said.
“So, ultimately, an exoskeleton is not just a tool. It is a collaborative system worn on the body.”
Users may not notice each system individually, but how well they work together determines whether the product performs consistently beyond a demonstration. For ULS, getting those details right is essential to building a device people can use regularly.
From industrial work to mountain trails
ULS’ move into outdoor recreation began with requests from industrial customers.
Its early industrial exoskeletons were designed primarily for lifting and carrying. They could assist walking, but workers who spent most of their time moving heavy objects had little need to walk long distances.
Around 2023, customers in power line inspection, forest firefighting, and border patrol began asking for smaller devices that could reduce the effort of walking across mountains for long periods.
ULS shifted its product priorities accordingly. It placed less emphasis on carrying heavy loads and prioritized low weight and walking assistance.
In 2024, Arc’teryx introduced the MO/GO softshell pants, bringing much wider attention to the category. ULS saw an opening in the broader consumer market.
Yet Viatrix X retains its industrial engineering roots. It targets a larger group of outdoor users, particularly middle-class office workers who spend weekdays at a desk and weekends hiking in the mountains.
Mountain trails make different demands on a device than a factory’s flat, paved floors. Wearers must turn, step across ditches, move sideways around obstacles, and adjust their posture on slopes.
The hip moves around several axes, but the mechanical pivots of conventional rigid exoskeletons do not always align with the body’s joints. A device that performs well in a laboratory or on level ground can therefore restrict the hips or chafe when used on uneven mountain terrain.
That problem led ULS to develop Float360, a floating hip joint design with four degrees of freedom.
“The human hip is very flexible and can move in three main directions. The floating exoskeleton hip joint we developed, with four degrees of freedom, can cover the full movement paths of the thigh and hip,” Xu told 36Kr.
Conventional exoskeleton hip joints generally have only one or two pivots, he said, effectively using the mechanism to prescribe how the wearer moves.
Float360 places several floating joints between the hip and thigh to give the wearer more freedom of movement. Instead of remaining fixed at a single point, the exoskeleton’s pivot adjusts to changes in the wearer’s posture. The design is intended to follow the combined movements of the hip and thigh, giving the mechanism room to move with the body.
The design reflects an emerging view in consumer exoskeleton development: additional degrees of freedom matter when they make it easier for the wearer to move naturally.
“The value of effective degrees of freedom is to give control of movement back to the user, adding assistance while fully preserving the body’s natural mobility,” Xu said.
Written descriptions and demonstration videos cannot fully convey that difference. ULS has therefore partnered with Swedish outdoor brand Haglofs, whose customers overlap with its own target audience of hikers and other outdoor enthusiasts.
Using Haglofs’ retail network, ULS has set up locations where customers can try on an exoskeleton and experience its assistance and freedom of movement. It hopes hands-on trials will help outdoor enthusiasts understand the product and become more familiar with it.
Xu sees technology as an established part of spending time in the mountains. Technical outerwear provides protection from water and cold, carbon fiber reduces equipment weight, and trekking poles offer physical support. An exoskeleton takes that a step further by actively assisting movement.
Such devices will not remove the fatigue of hiking or replace the effort and experience of being outdoors. But they can help people walk farther and reach places they would struggle to get to unaided.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Huang Nan for 36Kr.
Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.69 = USD 1 based on estimates as of October 19, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are approximate and, where appropriate, rounded for ease of reference. They may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.