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Chinese Military Tests Armed Robot Dogs and FPV Drones in Amphibious Drill Near Taiwan.
China’s People’s Liberation Army aired new footage of an amphibious landing scenario that paired four-legged robot dogs with multiple classes of drones near Taiwan, as shared by state media and amplified in Europe. The sequence signals how Beijing aims to blend expendable ground robots with infantry at the beachhead, while also revealing control, survivability, and logistics gaps that opponents can target.
On 28 October 2025, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) appeared in newly aired footage conducting an amphibious landing drill near Taiwan that integrated four-legged robot dogs and multiple classes of aerial drones, a vignette that both showcases rapid progress in manned–unmanned teaming and lays bare practical limits under fire. The scenario, circulated by state media accounts and amplified in Europe, arrives amid an elevated PLA operating tempo around the Strait and sustained political friction. It matters because the sequences demonstrate how Beijing intends to fuse expendable robots with infantry and amphibious assault units at the beachhead, an evolution with direct consequences for Taiwan’s defence planning and allied force design. The material was published by CGTN Europe and reported by the South China Morning Post.
New PLA footage shows an amphibious drill near Taiwan pairing robot dogs and drones with infantry, signaling rapid manned and unmanned teaming and exposing control and survivability gaps (Picture Source: CGTN Europe)
The drill portrays an assault wave whose amphibious armored vehicles are checked by coastal fires, forcing a switch to uncrewed breaching and suppression. First-person-view (FPV) quadcopters strike designated firing points while reconnaissance drones map defenders and cue follow-on elements. At the surf line, explosive-laden quadruped robots sprint across trenches, blocks and Czech-hedgehog-style barriers to blast lanes through obstacles; other robot dogs shuttle ammunition to dispersed squads, and a gun-bearing model accompanies a paratroop infiltration team maneuvering through jungle to cut off reinforcing units. The emphasis is on maintaining momentum despite route congestion and on distributing lethality across cheap, attritable systems to preserve human assault echelons.
The PLA’s operational narrative here fits a broader media arc, CCTV documentary segments and official messaging have for months showcased amphibious and airborne penetration drills and the integration of drones and robots in combined-arms assaults. Elements in the current broadcast echo materials tied to Strait Thunder-2025A, a two-day joint exercise in early April focused on blockade control and precision strike options around Taiwan, as well as to the later “Forging Ahead” series that illustrated cold-start transitions from training to combat tasks. This continuity suggests the robotized breaching vignette is not a one-off, but part of a rolling playbook the Eastern Theater Command is refining for strait scenarios.
From a development standpoint, Chinese labs and defense firms have iterated rapidly on legged platforms since 2023, pushing payload capacity, autonomy and low-cost manufacturing. The PLA’s current employment concept keeps the robots in attritable, mission-specific roles, obstacle reduction, last-meter resupply, point fire support, rather than as independent maneuver elements. That choice tracks with global experience: Russia has struggled to scale complex UGVs beyond niche tasks, while Western experiments with armed quadrupeds remain limited to trials and SWAT-style use cases. Against that baseline, the PLA’s advantage lies in saturating the breach with many cheap robots cued by abundant ISR; its disadvantage is that legged platforms remain slow, noisy, thermally conspicuous and fragile under direct fire and fragmentation.
Compared with similar products and concepts, PLA quadrupeds appear optimized for expendability and integration with mass FPV ecosystems rather than for protected mobility. U.S. and allied trials with armed Ghost Robotics or Boston Dynamics derivatives have emphasized perimeter security, remote sensing and room entry; Russia’s Marker UGV emphasized heavier armor and sensors but saw constrained battlefield use; by contrast, China’s beach-breach application exploits quantity, simple tasking and tight drone teaming. In an opposed landing, however, even a swarm of robotic dogs must cross beaten-zones swept by small arms and artillery fragments, where tracked MICLIC-type line charges or manned engineer vehicles historically bear the breaching load. The PLA’s concept trades individual platform survivability for tempo, but only succeeds if drones reliably suppress fires and if infiltration units sever the strongpoint’s command links, conditions that the documentary itself shows are hard to meet.
Strategically, the vignette signals three implications. Geopolitically, it advertises to regional audiences that Beijing is normalizing manned–unmanned amphibious task organization as part of routine signaling around Taiwan, reinforcing narratives of coercive readiness while keeping cost curves favorable through attritable systems. Geostrategically, it aligns with Strait Thunder-2025A’s focus on control and blockade: robotic breaching at select beaches, paired with drone-enabled precision and rear-area infiltrations, aims to present Taipei with simultaneous dilemmas across ports, energy nodes and coastal defenses to fracture command cohesion. Militarily, it foreshadows a contest of adaptation cycles: Taiwan and partners will field denser counter-UAS, decoys, buried charges and mobile reserves; the PLA will respond with thicker ISR layers, more loitering munitions, EW-resistant links and preemptive strikes on known strongpoints. The net effect is to push the first hours of any landing toward higher attrition and faster decision timelines, with robots absorbing some losses but not obviating the need for infantry to close and breach under fire.
This exercise, as presented in CGTN Europe material and parsed by SCMP, therefore offers a rare, unvarnished look at how China aims to choreograph robots and drones at the waterline, and how quickly those advantages evaporate when defenders harden positions and shoot accurately. It is a warning as much as a showcase: uncrewed systems can accelerate an assault only if suppression, infiltration and obstacle reduction are all synchronized; when any link fails, the cost falls back on soldiers.
Written by Teoman S. Nicanci – Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group
Teoman S. Nicanci holds degrees in Political Science, Comparative and International Politics, and International Relations and Diplomacy from leading Belgian universities, with research focused on Russian strategic behavior, defense technology, and modern warfare. He is a defense analyst at Army Recognition, specializing in the global defense industry, military armament, and emerging defense technologies.