Business

China's Unitree Slashes Price on New Humanoid Robot
By Reuters | 25 Jul, 2025

China's leading robotics firm slashes the price of its latest model by 60% from last year's heavier model.

assersby film a Unitree G1 humanoid robot operated by a staff member, in between Unitree's demonstrations to Reuters, at a park in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China March 21, 2025. REUTERS/Florence Lo/File Photo

China's homegrown robotics company Unitree Robotics on Friday launched a new bipedal humanoid robot at a starting price of 39,900 yuan ($5,566), a deep discount to the 2024 price of a previous model as manufacturing costs declined. 

R1, weighing about 25 kilograms, uses a multimodal large language model integrating speech and image modalities, according to a post on its RedNote account. 

The new model costs a fraction of G1, a popular bipedal that Unitree launched in 2024 at a starting price of 99,000 yuan. The latest R1 model is also lighter than the 35-kg G1.

($1 = 7.1681 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Qiaoyi Li and Ryan Woo. Editing by Jane Merriman)