China’s Robot Juggernaut Unitree Debuts a $650,000 Personal Gundam - Gizmodo
While the West continues its love affair with the money to be made from getting generative AI to do things for which it is manifestly unsuited, on the other side of the Pacific, it’s all robot everything.
Key takeaways
Figure AI’s humanoid robots have just broken a new endurance record, running three Helix‑02 units for over 24 hours of nonstop autonomous package sorting at its San Jose warehouse. The robots completed more than 28,000 sorts without a single failure, automatically resetting themselves when they encounter unfamiliar situations, and maintained speeds comparable to human workers. Earlier in the week the company streamed an eight‑hour shift in which a humanoid sorted packages for the first time on a public livestream, drawing millions of views and demonstrating an “zero‑failure” run. At the upcoming Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston (May 27‑28), industry leaders will examine how integrated semiconductor technologies and system‑level design can make humanoids more intelligent, agile and energy‑efficient, a session led by Texas Instruments’ robotics general manager. Canada’s Sanctuary AI says fully functional home‑use humanoids are still three to five years away, but expects commercial viability within the next three to seven years as companies such as 1X and Figure ramp up production. British startup Humanoid has sealed a deal with German industrial giant Schaeffler to place at least 1,000 – and potentially many more – humanoid robots in live manufacturing lines, a partnership that hints at a target of 100,000 units shipped by 2031. For hobbyists and small‑scale developers, the open‑source Asimov V1 kit arrived with a bill of materials and a price tag around $15,000, offering 25 degrees of freedom and a customizable compute stack. China is accelerating its own humanoid rollout under a new national blueprint that earmarks 2025 as the first year of mass production, with a pilot platform for robot components already under construction in Shanghai. Finally, Chinese robot maker Unitree unveiled a $650,000 personal “Gundam”‑style mech, showcasing the country’s push toward high‑profile, consumer‑focused humanoid platforms.
While the West continues its love affair with the money to be made from getting generative AI to do things for which it is manifestly unsuited, on the other side of the Pacific, it’s all robot everything. Not to be put in the shade by Honor and their marathon robot, Chinese robot company Unitree—you may remember them from such other automatons as the Lunar New Year kung fu dervishes and, um, the Jackass robot—have upped the ante with their latest creation, which is a freaking giant half-ton transforming mech suit. For a start, you’d think that $650,000 would get you a more comfortable… cockpit? I mean, who knows, maybe that’s enough for Unitree to reap a decent return on its investment—or maybe this is just a prototype/proof of concept for an actual Gundam, in the same way the first MacBook Air was a terrible machine that worked as a sort of overpriced public beta test for far superior iterations on the basic design.