Author: Jack Lee
Jack Lee
Jack Lee is an editor at Robots Daily and a graduate of Northwest University in Xi’an, China. He covers China’s robotics industry, with a particular interest in robot design, engineering and the technology behind new products. His reporting spans humanoid robots, quadruped robots, industrial automation and embodied AI, with a focus on how robots work and how their capabilities translate into real-world applications.
When Unitree Robotics put its H1 humanoid robot on sale in August 2023, the sticker price was around RMB 650,000. The industry average that year hovered near RMB 590,000. By 2026, the company’s G1 base model was going for RMB 85,000, and its new R1 dual-arm machine started at just RMB 26,900. That’s a drop of more than 95% in under three years. Overseas, the story is the same: average humanoid robot prices have slid from roughly $85,000 to $25,000. Across the industry, the average selling price (ASP) is down about 70% in two years. Unitree’s average selling price has…
The country is on track to produce over 100,000 humanoid robots in 2026. Industry data suggests that fewer than 5% are currently reaching factory production lines. The gap comes down to a single word: repeatability. The Numbers Behind the Hype Visitors at the 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing could be forgiven for thinking the factory of the future had already arrived. Some 373 exhibitors filled the halls with more than 3,000 robot products. Robots backflipped, sparred, sorted parcels, and simulated surgery. Crowds gathered with phones held high. Somewhere else, a different set of numbers was circulating. At a Xiaomi…
Unitree Robotics updated its G1 humanoid robot on September 14, launching the G1+ with six targeted upgrades across locomotion, perception, and interaction. In China, the standard version is priced at RMB 95,000 (about $13,300), including tax. On Unitree’s international website, the G1+ is listed at $15,000 before tax and shipping. Pricing for the G1+ EDU version, aimed at research and development, is available on request. The headline numbers look like a spec-sheet flex: peak torque up 110% for the shoulder and waist motors, maximum arm torque up 43%, a new 2-DOF neck, and a dual-camera vision system combining stereo and…
LIUZHOU, China — UBTECH Robotics has started production at a factory in Liuzhou that it describes as the world’s first industrial humanoid robot plant designed for annual output of more than 10,000 units. The plant, in Liuzhou’s Northern Ecological New Area, began operation on Sept. 12. The factory covers 14,000 square meters (150,700 square feet) and is 13.8 meters (45 feet) tall. The production line has a planned takt time of 10 minutes per robot, with annual capacity of more than 10,000 units. That target matters because humanoid robot manufacturing has been stuck at small volumes. For much of the…
Unitree has published new details about UnifoLM-WLA-1.0, its latest general-purpose humanoid robot foundation model. According to the company, the model brings fine-grained tabletop manipulation and whole-body mobile manipulation into one system, using a unified action space to handle different end effectors. Unitree’s aim is to use one model for the full chain from perception and interaction decisions to action generation. The model has 6 billion parameters. Unitree says it was trained on about 2,500 hours of high-quality real-robot data. The company’s real-robot tests cover 64 tasks: 10 whole-body manipulation tasks and 54 tabletop tasks. It supports parallel grippers and two…
On September 8, an XPENG IRON humanoid robot walked off the production line at XPENG Robotics. No crane, no workers carrying it—it stepped in front of the cameras on its own. XPENG says this is the world’s first advanced general-purpose humanoid robot to complete automated assembly and walk off the line by itself. Over the past year, XPENG’s public demonstrations of IRON have mostly centered on human-like design, motion control, and physical world large models. This time was different. The production line itself became the story. With automation above 80% for core processes, XPENG describes the facility as the world’s…
BEIJING — At the China National Convention Center on the morning of September 4, Yuanshan Zhixing Technology did not send a robot out to dance or perform backflips. The company had one product to show: a robot built to help people with visual impairments move through cities on their own. The robot is called Xiaoyuan. Its developer, Hangzhou Yuanshan Zhixing Technology, is a technology brand under Hangzhou Zhiyuan Research Institute, which is affiliated with China South Industries Group Corporation. The institute describes Xiaoyuan as the world’s first wheel-legged guide robot. The scale of the problem is clear. More than 17…
01. What Large Models Are Doing to Robot Architecture Take a humanoid robot apart and it was never one technical problem. It’s a stack of systems, each layer constraining the ones above and below it. The body. This is the robot’s physical hardware — motors, reducers, sensors, batteries. The cerebellum. Motion control. Standing, walking, grasping. This layer doesn’t care about why an action happens, only how to execute it. In China’s robotics industry — Unitree, Black Sesame Technologies, Horizon Robotics — people routinely call this layer the “cerebellum.” The brain. This is where the biggest changes have happened over the…
Hard to believe, but in 2026, the quadruped robots you see at a tech expo outnumber the golden retrievers, corgis, and poodles you’d run into walking around your neighborhood. Combined. This isn’t a joke. Quadruped robot form factors are diversifying faster than most dog breeds evolved. On the same technical foundation, manufacturers have bolted on wheels, saddles, humanoid torsos, dinosaur skeletons, drone landing pads. Every new configuration seems to open up a new scenario, a new audience, and a new revenue stream. After seeing these wild machine dog variants, you might conclude that pet dogs never stood a chance. A…
On August 29, inside a Dairy Queen on Wujiang Road in Shanghai, a silver-white dual-arm robot stood behind the counter. After a customer placed an order, it opened cabinet doors, fitted a cup ring, dispensed soft serve, added Oreo crumbs, ran the spindle mixer, and handed over a completed Blizzard. From order to handoff, the robot went through 55 consecutive steps — separating a paper cup from a sanitized tray, aligning a cup ring with sub-millimeter precision, dispensing the ice cream, adding toppings, running the high-speed mixing spindle, and finally inverting the cup for the signature Blizzard flip. That “flip…