Guides, comparisons and analyses to buy, compare and choose the right humanoid robot. Articles by the Botoide editorial team.
Munich, Paris and Chicago all crowned the same new buzzword — "embodied AI". Read together, their press releases say what none admits alone: the robot's body is a consumable, and the brain is rented from two or three American vendors.
Read article →On 9 June, the MIIT and SASAC co-signed a quota — 10,000 humanoids in commercial use before the end of 2026 — and named the provinces and state-owned enterprises that will carry it out. That same week, China Post, SF Express, Seres and Zoomlion took delivery of their robots. China's humanoid demand isn't being discovered: it is being assigned. And it runs on Nvidia.
Read article →From 2 to 8 June, the humanoid sector's strongest commercial traction went to UBTech's U1: a silicone companion that reads emotions, cannot be programmed, and performs no task. More than 2,100 reservations in six days — when the same maker's industrial division had sold just 1,079 robots in all of 2025.
Read article →Tokyo decrees the shift to scaling, Shanghai capitalises on it with the first listing of embodied AI, and the NIST reminds everyone that no consensus metric yet exists. The humanoid industry has listed scale on the market before building the instrument to measure it.
Read article →For a company, a robot's real cost isn't its purchase price. Between recoverable VAT, depreciation and deductible leasing, the net bill can drop by 30-40 %. The full picture.
Read article →Those two little letters "CE" aren't a quality label — they're a legal declaration by the manufacturer. For a humanoid robot walking around your home, they change everything. Plain-English explainer.
Read article →Hyundai promises 25,000 Atlas units, Humanoid.ai is gunning for the world title: that's the set dressing. The week's only hard metric lies elsewhere — the actuator accounts for 60% of the cost, and the two Western camps have just locked it down on the same day.
Read article →The manufacturer's advertised price is never the final one. Customs duties, VAT, transit and CE marking can add 30 % to 40 % to the bill. Full breakdown on a Unitree G1.
Read article →With around a dozen models available to buy or pre-order, picking the right humanoid robot has become a real exercise. Here are the 6 criteria to weigh before you sign.
Read article →A piloted GD01, a human fallback written into the Schaeffler contract, robots leading the Seoul procession: from 12 to 18 May, the sector openly puts the operator back at the centre — the exact opposite of the thread it held all winter.
Read article →On one side, the Chinese consumer humanoid at £13,000; on the other, the American industrial humanoid on lease. Which one for what use?
Read article →At £340/month for a Unitree G1, paying upfront barely makes sense anymore. Leasing is becoming the norm to democratise personal robots.
Read article →While China stacks up humanoids by the thousand, three of the week's developments — Genesis AI's GENE-26.5, the Figure 03 deployment at BMW, and the conversion of Tesla's Fremont line — reveal one and the same Western pivot: abandoning the race for body tonnage to crack dexterous manipulation instead. Two races, two units of account.
Read article →Four genuinely buyable robots and a challenger on the way. Our 2026 picks with prices, strengths and weaknesses.
Read article →The line between domestic and industrial humanoids isn't just marketing. It shapes the entire robot specification.
Read article →In the same week, Figure, Apptronik and Meta all made announcements without ever showing their robot doing actual work. Each shifted the ground elsewhere: the assembly line, the sales org chart, the operating system. Three ways of dodging the only question that matters — what can the machine do on its own?
Read article →Beyond the sticker price, a humanoid robot has a total cost of ownership that may surprise you. Full 3-year breakdown.
Read article →On 27 April, Tokyo-Haneda airport entrusts its luggage to a Unitree G1 — the very model Washington classes as a national security risk. This week, the Japanese ally is adopting what its strategic partner is working to ban: the Chinese humanoid robot is no longer a product, it is a choice of side that the labour shortage renders non-negotiable.
Read article →Between 14 and 20 April 2026, the humanoid show and the factory floor paraded almost the same day. While a Honor robot "beat" the Beijing half-marathon record through the rulebook, Zhiyuan's Elf G2 held out for eight hours non-stop on a real production line. For the first time, verifiable proof of work appears — and the right question stops being "who's number one?".
Read article →Edward Warchocki, a Unitree G1 imported into Poland, racked up tens of millions of views chasing wild boar across Warsaw. Set against the admission, in Boston, that a humanoid that actually works still costs too much, the episode reveals what China is really exporting to Europe: not a worker, but an influencer for hire.
Read article →This week, the rift between spectacle and substance left the China-West axis: Wandercraft's Calvin-40 carried tyres at Renault's Douai plant while Unitree, the star of the show, was drawn by lot for an IPO inspection.
Read article →In a single week, the West staged a speech-giving robot and domestic acquisitions while China lined up the tonnage: AgiBot's 10,000th unit and a G1 at 16,000 dollars. The story is American; the production curve is Chinese.
Read article →Three monetary facts in a single week — Unitree's IPO accepted on 20 March, a unit price down 71.7% in the very same prospectus, RobotEra's internationalised round closed on 23 March — together tell one sequence: China is floating the humanoid spectacle before it has a use for it.
Read article →Munich, GTC, China's 15th Plan, a puppet-robot: six announcements that look juxtaposed in fact pose a single question, the one NEURA spells out in black and white — where does the data that trains robots come from? Three incompatible answers, and a single supplier underneath the stack.
Read article →In a single week, three converging announcements tip the humanoid narrative from the body to the brain. Tether leads NEURA's round, Qualcomm puts its mobile chip in the robot, and Figure throws out 109,504 lines of code. Behind the word "record" hides a valuation halved.
Read article →While Wuhan and Honor filled the screens, the week's real sequence institutionalised the sector's governance: in China, the manufacturers are co-writing the standards that regulate them; state capital crosses the embodied-AI threshold for the first time; and Europe answers with private, closed governance.
Read article →On 23 February, AI² Robotics closed a Series B worth more than one billion yuan. But the money came from CRRC, a state-owned railway manufacturer, and from Baidu — the very firms that will deploy the robots. The funding round and the purchase order for 1,000 units are one and the same operation. At that same moment, in the West, Toyota Canada is leasing seven Digit units on a trial basis. Two market structures, not two speeds.
Read article →On 16 February, four Chinese manufacturers had their humanoids dance at the CCTV Gala. But the event of the week is not the choreography: it is its immediate conversion into purchase orders, into capital raised on both sides of the Pacific, and into an AgiBot subsidiary that pays humans in sensor harnesses to generate the data the robots lack.
Read article →In six days, three players with nothing in common — Mobileye, Humanoid.ai, EngineAI — said the same thing in three foreign-looking forms: the humanoid's body is worth nothing any more, and all the value has migrated to the software brain that pilots it.
Read article →Between 27 January and 2 February, AgiBot, Unitree and Tesla put out three incompatible "world number one" rankings. After the rigged demo, the word that cracks and the loaded stage, it is now the hard metric — the delivery figure — that lies. And the one man with no figure at all is promising the biggest of them all.
Read article →Four Chinese humanoid-robot makers walk onto CCTV's Spring Festival Gala. The press reads it as a coming-of-age moment for the sector. The cap table tells another story: the broadcaster owns part of its own cast.
Read article →In a single week, 1X, Skild, Humanoid-Siemens, Galbot and LimX all proclaimed autonomy. Behind the shared slogan, four incomparable realities: a research promise, a figure verified by a third party, a video and a closed loop.
Read article →Thirty-eight humanoids in Las Vegas, 55% of them from Chinese manufacturers. The coverage fixated on the backflips and the boxing bouts. What it missed: the spectacular teleoperation and the rock-bottom price are two sides of the same industrial shift — the sector has stopped selling robots and started selling data.
Read article →The opening ceremony of the GDPS 2025 featured lion dances and Tai Chi performed by Chinese humanoid robots. However, the choreography itself is the only format that makes it impossible to distinguish between autonomous operation and remote control. And what it obscures reveals more than it shows.
Read article →At less than half the price of its larger sibling, the R1 from Unitree, this robot looks like a bargain. However, with its battery life still to be proven and a platform launched at the same time to collect data, the real business model is not what it seems.
Read article →AgiBot celebrated the launch of its 5,000th humanoid robot, marking a milestone in mass production. However, the model chosen is a robot designed for entertainment, and it has been delivered to the studio of an actor. While the success in manufacturing is evident, there is a hidden problem: the company can produce humanoid robots much faster than it can find work for them.
Read article →The Shanghai GDPS 2025 skills competition uses the same vocabulary as a rigorous evaluation process, including a panel of experienced professionals. However, it does not publish any scores, winners, or success rates. This is a system that resembles a competition, but lacks the typical features.
Read article →At the opening of the GDPS 2025, a humanoid robot from Unitree, dressed in white, performed Tai-Chi movements while another robot from AgiBot danced the lion. Was this a display of artificial intelligence? The summit itself provides the key to understanding this performance.
Read article →Unitree is presenting its new platform as the first "app store" for humanoid robots. However, behind this consumer-facing facade, its two real functions tell a completely different story.
Read article →The 1X company's humanoid robot, the NEO, which is marketed as a "do-it-all" home assistant, is now being used in factories and warehouses. This is officially presented as a partnership, but in reality, it's a strategic retreat.
Read article →While the star robots are running around in commercials or tripping in public, a non-charismatic humanoid has just secured a new client after already moving over 100,000 boxes in a warehouse. What if seriousness is measured by results, not by the spectacle?
Read article →In a carefully produced video in December 2025, Tesla showcased its robot, Optimus, running. However, the demonstration ended with the robot falling. Two images, one question: what truly constitutes autonomy?
Read article →Midea presents MIRO U as a humanoid robot with six arms. However, it rolls instead of walking, and it has three pairs of arms – which contradicts the term "humanoid".
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