China Is Building Most of the World's Humanoid Robots, and Selling Them for the Price of a Used Car
Chinese manufacturers now make an estimated 85 percent of the world's humanoid robots, with entry models starting around $4,000 to $6,000. The harder problem, makers admit, is finding enough customers who need one.
Chinese companies now produce an estimated 85 percent of the world's humanoid robots, and the prices have fallen to a level that changes who can buy one. Unitree, the best-known of them, sells an entry model starting around $4,000 to $6,000 — less than a used car, and a fraction of what a comparable machine cost three years ago. Its larger models run to $100,000, and competitors fill in the range between.
The machines are past the stage of being demonstrations. Reporting from Chinese factories describes them sorting mail, moving parts on assembly lines, and doing light household tasks. They are not fast, and they are not clever about unfamiliar situations, but they work.
The reason China dominates this is the same reason it dominates electric vehicles and solar panels: the government made humanoid robotics a strategic priority, the supply chain for motors, batteries and sensors is already there, and manufacturers compete on price with a ruthlessness that drives costs down quickly. American companies — Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics — are building more capable machines in much smaller numbers at much higher prices.
The interesting problem, which manufacturers themselves acknowledge, is demand. Making a cheap humanoid robot has turned out to be more tractable than finding enough people who need one. A machine that costs $5,000 and can do a few things slowly is not obviously better than the specialized equipment a factory already owns, or than a person. The industry's bet is that the software improves fast enough to make the machines generally useful before the manufacturing capacity built for them goes idle.
That is a familiar shape. The hardware arrived first and got cheap. Whether the intelligence to justify it arrives is the open question — and it is the same question hanging over every other part of this field.