Unitree drops the G1 at ICRA — a $16,000 humanoid.

At ICRA 2024 in Yokohama, Unitree Robotics rolled out the G1: a 127 cm, 35 kg humanoid with a starting price of $16,000. For context, that's an order of magnitude below the price bracket every North American humanoid was targeting for pilot units at the time.

The pitch wasn't that the G1 could do a factory shift. It was that G1 could put a real bipedal humanoid on a research bench, a classroom floor, or a developer's desk — for the price of a decent used car. Imitation-learning and reinforcement-learning demos followed within weeks of the announcement.

The strategic read was obvious. Unitree had already done this to the quadruped market with the Go1. Now it was doing it to the humanoid market. If you build against a $100k+ platform, you will eventually have to explain to your board why your competitor is prototyping on a $16k one.