Unitree Robotics — humanoid and quadruped robots from Hangzhou
Unitree Robotics (宇树科技) is a Hangzhou-headquartered Chinese robotics company and the world's highest-volume manufacturer of legged robots. With the H2 full-size humanoid, the G1 $16,000 mid-sized humanoid, and the ubiquitous Go2 and B2 quadrupeds, Unitree has become one of the defining players of the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose AI boom, alongside Tesla Optimus, Figure AI, 1X, Apptronik, XPeng, UBTECH, Agibot, and Boston Dynamics.
- 2016Founded
- Hangzhou, CNHeadquarters
- H2Latest flagship (2025)
- $900M IPOFunding raised
- ChinaCountry
- SSE: STARStatus
About Unitree Robotics
Unitree Robotics — formally Hangzhou Unitree Technology Co., Ltd. (宇树科技) — was founded in August 2016 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang by Wang Xingxing (王兴兴), a young engineer who first became known while still a graduate student for building a low-cost bipedal robot from roughly ¥200 in parts. Wang started the company from a 50-square-meter office with about $275,000 in angel funding and an unusually clear thesis: that legged robotics could be redesigned around commodity motors, in-house control software, and a manufacturing-first BOM to break the $75,000+ price umbrella held by Western incumbents like Boston Dynamics. He remains Unitree's founder, chairman, and CEO, and its controlling shareholder through a dual-class structure.
Unitree's first commercial product, the Laikago quadruped, appeared in 2017, followed by the A1 and the breakout Go1 in 2021 — a robot dog that launched at roughly $2,700 and reset consumer expectations for a category dominated by five-figure research platforms. Iterations of the Go and industrial B lines followed year after year, culminating in the LiDAR-equipped Go2 in 2023 and the IP67-rated, 120 kg-payload B2 industrial platform the same year. Unitree now holds roughly a 60% global share of the quadruped robot market and has shipped tens of thousands of legged robots worldwide.
In 2023 the company entered humanoid robotics with the H1 — the first Chinese full-size, general-purpose humanoid to publicly walk, run at 3.3 m/s, and perform a world-first electric humanoid backflip. In August 2024 Unitree released the mid-sized G1, priced from about US$16,000, and in October 2025 the full-size flagship H2 "Destiny Awakening". Along the way Unitree became one of the most-viewed robotics brands on social media, with H1 units dancing at the 2025 CCTV Spring Festival Gala and G1 units rung the Nasdaq opening bell as the "KOID-bot" mascot of KraneShares' humanoid-robotics ETF.
Prior to going public, Unitree raised capital from HongShan (Sequoia China), Matrix Partners China, Shunwei Capital, and Shenzhen Capital Group, followed by a June 2025 round backed by Meituan, Tencent, Alibaba, Ant Group, China Mobile, and Geely affiliates. In March 2026 the company filed for a Shanghai STAR Market IPO; CSRC approval on July 3, 2026 was the fastest in the exchange's history, and in August 2026 Unitree began trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, pricing at 150.80 yuan per share for roughly $900 million raised at an initial valuation near $9 billion — the first pure-play "embodied AI" listing on China's A-share market. Direct competitors span Boston Dynamics in quadrupeds and XPeng, UBTECH, Agibot, Fourier, Figure AI, Tesla Optimus, and 1X in humanoids.
Product lineup: humanoids and quadrupeds
Unitree ships a broader product line than any other legged-robot manufacturer, spanning two parallel families: humanoid robots (R1, G1, H1, H2) aimed at researchers, integrators, and increasingly consumers, and quadruped robots (Go2, B2, A2) aimed at hobbyists, universities, and industrial inspection customers. Aggressive vertical integration — in-house PMSM motors, in-house controllers, in-house software stack, and a rapidly falling BOM cost — is the through-line across the entire line.
H1 (2023) — China's first full-size general-purpose humanoid
The H1 was Unitree's inaugural full-size humanoid: roughly 1.80 m tall and 47 kg, with a top walking speed of 3.3 m/s that briefly held the legged-humanoid speed record, a 360 N·m peak knee torque, and a quick-replace 864 Wh battery. It became globally recognized after a fleet of red-jacketed H1 units performed a choreographed folk dance at the 2025 CCTV Spring Festival Gala — one of the most-watched broadcasts on the planet — instantly making it one of the most-viewed humanoid robots on social media.
G1 (2024) — the $16,000 mass-market humanoid
Launched in August 2024, the G1 is Unitree's mid-sized humanoid: roughly 1.27 m tall and 35 kg, with 23 to 43 permanent-magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) rotary joint actuators depending on trim, an Intel RealSense depth camera, and a quick-release battery good for roughly two hours of runtime. Its starting price of about US$16,000 (¥99,000 in China) undercut every comparable Western humanoid by a factor of five to ten and made the G1 the default answer to the question "what's the cheapest real humanoid robot?"
H2 (2025) — the bionic-face flagship
The H2 "Destiny Awakening", launched in October 2025, is Unitree's current full-size flagship. It stands about 1.82 m and weighs 70 kg, with a full 31 degrees of freedom — six per leg, seven per arm, a three-DoF waist and a two-DoF head — up to 360 N·m of leg joint torque and 120 N·m at the arms, 7 kg continuous / 15 kg peak per-arm payload, and Unitree's first bionic sculpted face with animated eyes. Modular compute scales from an Intel Core i5 motion-control PC up to an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor at 2,070 TOPS. Base list price is $29,900.
Quadrupeds — Go2, B2, and the industrial line
Alongside its humanoids, Unitree ships the LiDAR-equipped Go2 consumer quadruped (from $1,600), the industrial IP67-rated B2 (120 kg standing payload, over 6 m/s top speed), and the newer A2 endurance quadruped. The Go2 in particular is arguably the single most recognizable robot on the internet, with GPT integration, 4D LiDAR, and a base weight of about 15 kg.
| Model | Year | Height | Weight | Payload | Battery/Runtime | Actuators | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| H1 | 2023 | ~1.80 m | ~47 kg | ~30 kg | 864 Wh / ~2 hr | PMSM, 360 N·m knee | 3.3 m/s speed; 2025 CCTV Gala dance |
| G1 | 2024 | ~1.27 m | ~35 kg | ~3–5 kg | 9000 mAh / ~2 hr | 23–43× PMSM joints | $16k mass-market humanoid |
| H2 | 2025 | ~1.82 m | ~70 kg | 7 kg cont. / 15 kg peak | 972 Wh / ~3 hr | 31 DoF PMSM | Bionic face; up to 2,070 TOPS Jetson Thor |
| Go2 | 2023 | ~40 cm | ~15 kg | ~7–8 kg (max 12) | 8–15 Ah / 2–4 hr | 12× joint motors | 4D LiDAR, GPT integration; from $1,600 |
| B2 | 2023 | ~55 cm | ~60 kg | 40 kg walking / 120 kg static | >4 hr @ 20 kg | Hi-torque PMSM | IP67; industrial inspection flagship |
Technology stack
Unitree's engineering philosophy is unusually vertical for a company its age: it designs its own high-torque motors, its own joint controllers, its own control software, its own perception stack, and increasingly its own foundation models — all optimized around a cost-down BOM that has driven the per-unit cost of both its quadrupeds and humanoids down by roughly half in three years, according to its IPO prospectus.
Perception
Unitree platforms combine wide-field-of-view binocular stereo cameras, 3D and 4D LiDAR modules, IMUs, microphone arrays, and — on humanoids — force and tactile sensing at the hands. Go2 and higher-tier quadrupeds ship with 4D LiDAR by default, and the H2's head integrates a bionic-faced binocular vision system with a roughly 140° × 102° field of view. This mix of vision, depth, inertial, and touch is what allows a G1 or H2 to navigate a lab floor, catch itself on a bad step, and manipulate loose objects without external instrumentation.
AI, control, and the UnifoLM VLA
Unitree's control stack combines classical whole-body model-predictive control with learning-trained locomotion policies, trained partially in simulation and refined on hardware. On the AI side, Unitree has open-sourced UnifoLM-VLA-0, a Vision-Language-Action model already demonstrated executing household tasks on H2-class hardware from natural-language and vision inputs, and it supports secondary development through ROS 2 and a Python SDK on the G1/H1/H2 EDU tiers.
Actuators, power, and compute
Every Unitree robot uses electric brushless-DC and permanent-magnet synchronous motors — no hydraulics — with in-house designs such as the M107 delivering roughly 360 N·m of peak knee torque on H1 and H2. The H2 pairs those motors with industrial-grade crossed roller bearings and low-inertia inner-rotor PMSMs for high response and improved heat dissipation. A quick-release 972 Wh, 75.6 V smart battery drives roughly three hours of continuous operation on H2, and modular compute options range from an Intel Core i5 motion-control PC through an i7 development tier to an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor at 2,070 TOPS. Up to three additional NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX modules can be added on top for perception and VLA workloads.
A humanoid or high-payload quadruped at this level puts unusual pressure on its power electronics. Each joint's servo controller must deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling, which drives the use of high-efficiency wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN) in the motor-driver stages, MLCC and precision film capacitors on every gate-drive and current-sense channel, and precision low-tolerance resistors across the sensing chain. The onboard battery pack integrates cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection ICs — battery-management ICs whose reliability is often the practical ceiling on how long a legged platform can run between charges.
Applications and commercial deployments
Unitree ships more legged robots than any other manufacturer worldwide — more than 5,500 humanoids in 2025 alone, according to its IPO prospectus, for a reported 32.4% global humanoid-robot market share — and more than half a million quadrupeds cumulatively across Go1, Go2, B1, and B2. Its customers span three broad categories:
- Academic and industrial research. The G1, H1 EDU, and H2 EDU are standard research platforms at hundreds of universities and corporate labs worldwide, including institutions in more than 60 countries. Unitree's SDK, ROS 2 support, and open-source UnifoLM-VLA-0 model have made its humanoids the default hardware for embodied AI research outside a small number of vertically integrated Western startups.
- Industrial inspection, security, and emergency response. The B1, B2, and A2 industrial quadrupeds — IP67-rated, with thermal, searchlight, and LiDAR payloads — patrol electrical substations, chemical plants, construction sites, and perimeter security zones across Asia, Europe, and North America. B2's 120 kg standing payload and over 4-hour endurance under 20 kg load make it a direct alternative to Boston Dynamics' Spot in industrial deployments.
- Consumer, entertainment, and viral demonstrations. The Go2 has become one of the most-viewed robots on TikTok, YouTube, and Chinese social media, and H1 units famously danced at the 2025 CCTV Spring Festival Gala. Unitree G1 units have also rung the Nasdaq opening bell as the "KOID-bot" mascot of KraneShares' humanoid-robotics ETF, reinforcing the brand's cultural profile alongside its engineering one.
The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in
A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single Unitree-class platform such as the H2 or G1 depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC and PMSM motor drivers, high-torque servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards such as NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor and Orin NX, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board and mezzanine connectors, precision resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.
Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams — Unitree, XPeng, UBTECH, Agibot, Figure AI, Tesla Optimus, 1X, Apptronik, and Boston Dynamics among them — are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, Jetson-class compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.
Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:
Obsolete and end-of-life parts
Legacy semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives that are no longer in mainstream distribution — the parts that keep older platforms running during transitions to newer hardware, and the long-tail items that block a BOM from closing.
Allocated and hard-to-find active parts
High-torque BLDC and PMSM motor drivers, IMUs and MEMS sensors, SiC/GaN power devices, Jetson-class compute modules, precision resistors, and MLCC capacitors caught in allocation or long-lead times. Send us a BOM or a shortage list — we'll confirm what we can source and at what lead time.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Unitree Robotics?
Unitree Robotics (宇树科技) was founded in August 2016 in Hangzhou, China by Wang Xingxing (王兴兴), a young engineer who first became known while still a graduate student for building a low-cost bipedal robot from roughly ¥200 in parts. Wang remains Founder, Chairman, and CEO, and is Unitree's controlling shareholder through a dual-class structure with roughly 68.8% of voting rights pre-IPO.
What is the Unitree H2?
The H2 "Destiny Awakening" is Unitree's 2025 full-size flagship humanoid robot: approximately 1.82 m tall, 70 kg, with 31 degrees of freedom, up to 360 N·m of leg-joint torque, a bionic sculpted face with animated eyes, and modular compute options that scale up to an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor at 2,070 TOPS. Base list price is $29,900 on Unitree's official store.
Where are Unitree robots deployed?
Unitree ships more humanoid robots than any other manufacturer worldwide — more than 5,500 units in 2025 per its IPO prospectus, for a reported 32.4% global market share. G1 and H2 EDU units are used in university and corporate research labs across more than 60 countries. Its Go2 and B2 quadrupeds are used for industrial inspection, security patrol, and emergency response, and H1 units famously danced at the 2025 CCTV Spring Festival Gala.
How much has Unitree raised and is it public?
Unitree completed its IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market in August 2026, pricing at 150.80 yuan per share and raising roughly 6.1 billion yuan (about $900 million) at an initial valuation near 61 billion yuan (about $9 billion) — the first pure-play embodied-AI listing on China's A-share market. Prior investors include HongShan (Sequoia China), Matrix Partners China, Shunwei Capital, Shenzhen Capital Group, Meituan, Tencent, Alibaba, Ant Group, China Mobile, and Geely affiliates.
Is Hybrid Electronics affiliated with Unitree Robotics?
No. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company. We are not a distributor, reseller, or partner of Unitree Robotics. All trademarks are property of their respective owners. Hybrid supports robotics developers by sourcing obsolete, allocated, and hard-to-find semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives for R&D, prototype, and low-volume production builds.
Can Hybrid help with components for humanoid robotics builds?
Yes. We regularly support R&D and integrator teams with hard-to-find semiconductors, BLDC and PMSM motor-driver ICs, IMUs and other MEMS sensors, connectors, SiC/GaN power devices, and precision passives for the industrial and embedded boards used in humanoid and quadruped robotics platforms. Send us a BOM or a short list of shortages and we'll confirm availability and pricing.
Trademark and affiliation notice. Unitree®, Unitree Robotics, H1, H2, G1, R1, Go1, Go2, B1, B2, and A2 are trademarks of Hangzhou Unitree Technology Co., Ltd. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Hangzhou Unitree Technology Co., Ltd. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.