Got $16,000? You Can Buy Your Very Own Humanoid Robot
It’s 2024 — weren’t we all supposed to have personal robots by now? Here’s your chance: Unitree Robotics is selling a 4-foot-tall, AI-powered humanoid robot for $16,000. Pricey, but a whole lot cheaper than some other robots.
The Unitree G1 seems like a capable little creature. It boasts 23 joint motors that help it move around, according to Unitree’s site, and features an 8-core high-performance CPU. It can collapse itself into a smaller package that makes it (somewhat) easy to carry (it still weighs about 80 pounds, or 35 kilograms). And a 9,000 mAh battery powers the robot for two hours.
There’s also an educational variant of the G1 listed on the site, boasting additional waist joints, more maximum torque in the knee joints, and an added four months of warranty coverage.
Watch this: Unitree G1 vs. Boston Dynamics Atlas: Hypermobility in Humanoid Robots
The robot employs a LIVOX-MID360 LiDAR sensor and an Intel RealSense D435 depth-sensing camera to analyze and interact with its surroundings, the company says.
A promotional video for the G1 shows the bot lifting itself off the floor without much of a problem, walking around, and even maintaining its balance when being kicked and punched. The robot twirls a baton, flips a piece of toast in a frying pan and cracks some walnuts with its hands. The robot gives off Boston Dynamics vibes, doing a bunch of humanlike things in a very nonhumanlike way.
Getting a humanoid robot into your living room for under $20,000 could be a pretty nifty achievement on the part of Unitree. However, at 4-feet tall, the bot might need a step stool (or coffee table) to do anything. There isn’t a lot of documentation on Unitree’s website about the built-in capabilities of the robot, so it may be that users need to manually program functions using Unitree’s SDK.
CNET took a look at the Unitree G1 versus its nearest competitor, the Boston Dynamics Atlas, and found that both robots show a lot of promise. But though Boston Dynamics’ new Atlas robot is a technological marvel, you can’t buy one. The Unitree G1, however, is available for purchase right now.
In short, this is probably a product for robot enthusiasts and businesses and not so much for the typical consumer. Robots have come a long way over the last couple of decades, but they still aren’t quite ready for prime time. But it’s still pretty cool that you can buy one just to tinker with and learn about, right?
What is Unitree?
Unitree Robiotics is a China-based manufacturer that you might not have heard of before, since it doesn’t make quite as big a splash as Boston Dynamics. It’s best known for making budget robots. Yes, $16,000 for a small humanoid robot doesn’t imply budget-friendliness. However, considering that Spot, Boston Dynamics’ Internet famous robot dog, costs $74,500, the price of the G1 doesn’t seem quite so over the top.
The brand also makes the H1, which is a taller, heavier and more capable version of the G1, though the sensor package is the same for both. It makes three consumer-facing dog robots too: the A1, Go1 and Go2. That expands to six if you count dog robots made for industrial uses.
And Unitree says the H1 recently set a world record for the fastest full-size humanoid robot, at 3.3 meters per second. So perhaps the H1 is making some kind of progress against big-name rivals.
