Startups, automakers, universities: who builds humanoids

G1 is Unitree's compact humanoid, announced in May 2024 at USD 16,000 and now listed at USD 13,500. Its low price and open SDK made it the default research and education humanoid worldwide. Read the configuration carefully: the standard machine does not support your own code, and the EDU version that does starts at USD 43,900.

NEO is 1X's consumer home humanoid, opened for preorder on 28 October 2025 at USD 20,000 with deliveries planned for 2026. It is about 30 kg, tendon-driven and wears a soft suit, and it uses remote human operators for tasks it cannot yet do autonomously. It is the first humanoid marketed directly to households at a published price.

Figure 01 was Figure AI's first humanoid, shown walking in October 2023 and demonstrated with OpenAI's vision-language model in March 2024. It was 168 cm tall, 60 kg, with a 20 kg payload and five-hour runtime. It established the company and led to the BMW agreement in January 2024.

Digit added a torso, arms and perception to the Cassie legs and was first shown in February 2019. Ford bought the first two units in 2020 for last-mile delivery research, and v2 and v3 added better perception and hands-free manipulation of totes. These versions were superseded by the 2023 Digit.

The hydraulic Atlas was unveiled in July 2013 for the DARPA Robotics Challenge and became the best-known research humanoid of the 2010s through its parkour and backflip videos. Later versions were 150 cm tall, 89 kg and had 28 hydraulic joints. Boston Dynamics retired it in April 2024.

Forerunner K1 was Shanghai startup Kepler's first humanoid, shown at CES 2024 with a stated USD 30,000 target price and roller-screw linear actuators similar in concept to Tesla Optimus.

Walker was UBTech's first full-size humanoid. The CES 2018 version had legs and a torso screen but no arms; the CES 2019 version added arms and hands with 36 degrees of freedom.

The Alpha series of 40 cm hobby humanoids built UBTech's early business and funded its later full-size Walker program. Alpha 1S robots performed on the 2016 Spring Festival Gala.

Atom is the first humanoid from Dobot, a Shenzhen collaborative-robot maker listed in Hong Kong. It launched at CNY 199,000 with claims of 0.05 mm arm precision.

ROBOTIS OP3 is the third generation of the open platform humanoid line that started with DARwIn-OP. It is a 51 cm, 3.5 kg kid size research robot with 20 degrees of freedom, an Intel NUC and a ROS based open source software stack. It is used in RoboCup and in teaching labs worldwide.

ROBOTIS MINI is a 27 cm desktop humanoid built on DYNAMIXEL servos, controlled with block coding or Python. A safe, durable first robot for schools, and the smallest member of the family that runs up to the full-size OP3.

RB-Y1 is a wheeled two-armed humanoid platform from Rainbow Robotics with 7-DOF arms and a 6-DOF torso, aimed at embodied AI research.

Optimus Gen 2, revealed on 12 December 2023, is about 10 kg lighter than Gen 1, walks 30 percent faster and has Tesla-designed actuators, an actuated neck and tactile fingers. It has been used for internal factory trials and at Tesla marketing events, where it was partly teleoperated. It is the version the public has seen most.

Optimus V3 is the version Tesla describes as production-intent, with a new 22 DoF hand and forearm and a factory line in Fremont planned for 2026. Musk has repeatedly said V3 would be unveiled in early 2026 and that volume production is targeted for later in the decade. Tesla has stated a long-term ambition of one million units per year.

ASIMO, unveiled by Honda on 31 October 2000, was the best known humanoid of its era, evolving through several versions until the 2011 model that ran at 9 km/h. Honda ended development in 2018 and retired the robot from public shows in 2022.

T-HR3 is Toyota's third-generation humanoid, a teleoperated avatar with torque-controlled joints that mirrors an operator's movements. It was demonstrated over 5G and at the Tokyo Olympics.

Iron is Xpeng's full-size humanoid, first shown in November 2024 working in its Guangzhou car plant. The 2025 version adds 82 degrees of freedom, a bionic spine, solid-state battery and Xpeng's own Turing chips, with mass production planned for late 2026.

Mornine is a showroom humanoid from Chery's AiMOGA robotics unit, deployed in Chery car dealerships from 2025 and exported to Malaysia.

GoMate is the humanoid of car maker GAC Group with a variable wheel-foot lower body that switches between two-wheel and four-wheel modes. GAC plans to use it in its own factories and 4S stores.

ToddlerBot is a 56 cm, 3.4 kg open source humanoid from Stanford University designed as a low cost platform for machine learning research on locomotion and manipulation. It has 30 degrees of freedom, is built from 3D printed parts and Dynamixel servos, and includes a full simulation and teleoperation pipeline. Everything needed to build it is public.

Berkeley Humanoid Lite is a fully open source, 3D printed, mid sized humanoid from UC Berkeley intended to make humanoid research accessible. All hardware, firmware, simulation and training code are public and the parts cost under 5,000 dollars. It uses 3D printed cycloidal actuators that can be rebuilt after failure.

CyberOne was Xiaomi's first full-size humanoid, revealed by Lei Jun in August 2022. It remained a research prototype.

QRIO was Sony's 58 cm entertainment humanoid that became the first bipedal robot to run in 2003. Sony cancelled it in 2006 during restructuring.

R1 is the first humanoid from Robbyant, the embodied-AI subsidiary of Ant Group, shown cooking at the Inclusion Conference in Shanghai in September 2025.

AMBIDEX is Naver Labs' lightweight cable-driven dual-arm robot designed to be safe around people, used for 5G brainless-robot experiments and manipulation research.

Pepper is a 120 cm wheeled humanoid designed by Aldebaran for SoftBank and launched in June 2014 as a social robot for shops, banks and homes. About 27,000 were built before production paused in 2020. It is the most widely deployed social humanoid to date.

AEON is Hexagon's industrial humanoid, unveiled on 17 June 2025 at HxGN LIVE in Las Vegas. It combines legs with wheels for locomotion, hot-swappable batteries and Hexagon's measurement sensors, and is aimed at inspection, scanning and material handling in factories.

Elektro was a 2.1 meter aluminium humanoid built by Westinghouse for the 1939 New York World's Fair. It walked on rollers, spoke about 700 words played from records, blew up balloons and smoked cigarettes. It is the best known pre computer humanoid and shaped the popular image of the robot.

Robonaut 2 was developed by NASA and General Motors and became the first humanoid robot in space when it launched to the ISS in February 2011. A leg set arrived in 2014 but hardware faults limited its use and it returned to Earth in 2018. Its dexterous hands influenced later industrial humanoids.

Valkyrie (R5) is NASA Johnson Space Center's electric humanoid, built in 2013 for the DARPA Robotics Challenge and later loaned to universities and to Woodside Energy for remote-operation research. Several Apptronik founders worked on it. It remains a research platform.

HRP-5P is AIST's construction-oriented humanoid that demonstrated autonomous drywall installation in 2018, aimed at labour shortages in Japanese building sites.

Tiangong was presented as the first full-size electric humanoid able to run, and released as an open platform by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in April 2024.

Tiangong 2.0 is the 2025 update of the Beijing open humanoid platform, released together with the Huisi Kaiwu software stack.

Qinglong is the 185 cm open-source humanoid of the Shanghai national humanoid robot innovation center, released as the OpenLoong platform at WAIC 2024.

iCub is the open-source child-sized humanoid developed by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa from the EU RobotCub project (2004 to 2010). With 53 DoF and full-body tactile skin, it became a standard platform for cognitive robotics research, with dozens of units in labs worldwide. iCub3, a larger 125 cm version, was introduced in 2021.

HopeJR is a low-cost open-source humanoid announced by Hugging Face with The Robot Studio in May 2025, with 66 degrees of freedom and a target price of about USD 3,000. It is aimed at hobbyists and researchers using Hugging Face's LeRobot library.

The K1 Pro is a programmable walking toy robot with 17 servos and app-based coding. It is the cheapest thing in this catalogue that walks on two legs unaided, and it is a toy, sold as one.

TonyPi Pro is a Raspberry Pi 5 humanoid kit with 18 bus servos and a vision pipeline, used in classrooms and university courses for object tracking, face recognition and autonomous sorting. It is a teaching platform, not a machine that will do anything useful in a house.

The Kondo KHR series, starting with KHR-1 in 2004, made bipedal humanoids affordable for hobbyists and schools. KHR-3HV is the long-running current model.

NEXTAGE is a humanoid-style dual-arm industrial robot from Kawada that works alongside people on assembly lines, one of the earliest humanoids used in production.

Reachy 2 is an open-source humanoid with two arms, an expressive head and a mobile base from Pollen Robotics of Bordeaux, designed for VR teleoperation and AI research. Hugging Face acquired Pollen in April 2025 and sells Reachy 2 alongside its LeRobot software.

Reachy Mini is a desktop-size expressive robot head and torso from Pollen Robotics, now part of Hugging Face. It is not a walking humanoid, it is the cheapest legitimate way to start building with the open embodied-AI stack that runs on its full-size sibling Reachy 2.

4NE-1 is the humanoid from Neura Robotics of Metzingen, Germany, first revealed in 2023 and shown in a third generation at Automatica 2025. Neura, founded by David Reger in 2019, also makes cognitive industrial robots and positions 4NE-1 for factories and later households.

Ameca is Engineered Arts' expressive humanoid, unveiled in December 2021 and shown at CES 2022, best known for realistic facial expressions and LLM-driven conversation. Gen 2 arrived in 2023 with a modular design. It is used for research, exhibitions and events rather than physical work.

FEDOR was a Russian teleoperated humanoid developed by Android Technics and the Advanced Research Foundation that flew on Soyuz MS-14 to the ISS in August 2019, the first humanoid to ride a Soyuz.

Phoenix is Sanctuary AI's general-purpose humanoid, first shown as Gen 6 in May 2023 and iterated to Gen 7 in April 2024 and Gen 8 in 2025. Its distinguishing feature is fast, miniaturised hydraulic hands with tactile sensing. Sanctuary has a manufacturing and deployment partnership with Magna.

REEM-C, launched in 2013, is a full-size bipedal research platform from PAL Robotics with 44 degrees of freedom and ROS support, sold to universities and labs. It was Spain's first commercial full-body biped.

TALOS is PAL Robotics' torque-controlled research humanoid launched in 2017, 175 cm tall and 95 kg with 32 DoF and 6 kg payload per arm. The first unit, named Pyrene, went to LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse. It is used for whole-body control research in Europe.

Sophia is the expressive-face humanoid from Hong Kong's Hanson Robotics, activated in February 2016. It became the first robot granted citizenship (Saudi Arabia, October 2017) and is mainly a media and conference presence.

Menteebot is the humanoid from Israeli startup Mentee Robotics, founded in 2022 by Amnon Shashua, Lior Wolf and Shai Shalev-Shwartz. First shown in April 2024, the production-intent V3 revealed in January 2025 is 175 cm, 70 kg with a 25 kg payload and five-hour battery.

Heal is the humanoid announced by Indian warehouse-robot maker Addverb, backed by Reliance, for healthcare and industrial use.

Clone Alpha is the planned home android built on Clone Robotics' musculoskeletal technology, announced in December 2024 with a first batch of 279 preorder units. As of 2026 it remains a concept with no confirmed deliveries.

ADA GH5 is the flagship humanoid of Akinrobotics, which opened what it called Turkey's first humanoid robot factory in Konya in December 2017.

VinMotion is the humanoid robotics company of Vietnam's Vingroup, set up in January 2025 to build robots for VinFast factories and services.

NAO is a 58 cm programmable humanoid from Aldebaran, first sold in 2008 and adopted as the RoboCup standard platform. It is the most widely distributed humanoid in education and research with over 13,000 units. The current NAO6 dates from 2018.