New robots, new capabilities. Tracking what's coming for the workforce.
Robotics Unitree's GD01 mecha — 2.7m tall, walks on two legs or four, carries a human pilot — lists at 3.9M yuan ($574K). The product launch arrives the same quarter the company is filing a 4.2B-yuan STAR Market IPO at a $7B target mark.
Robotics Unitree opened UniStore on May 7 with 24 motion apps — Bruce Lee, Wing Chun, Michael Jackson dance, a hip-wiggling routine. The next day, two Figure F.03 robots tidied a real bedroom without a single human prompt. The gap is the story.
Robotics On May 7 Unitree opened UniStore, billed as the world's first humanoid robot task-and-action app store, with 24 motion apps available at launch — including dancing, boxing, striding, plus Jackson dance moves, Jeet Kune Do, and Charleston — installable to a Unitree G1 in one tap. It arrives one week after the $3,949 R1 and one day after Unitree's $610M Shanghai IPO filing — the cleanest signal yet that the humanoid market is being shaped from the consumer-app side first, not the factory side.
Robotics On May 7 Morgan Stanley published its China humanoid-robot industry survey: 150+ vendors, 14,000 units delivered in 2025, 62% intent-to-adopt within 3 years, but only 23% buyer satisfaction and a 200,000-RMB (~$28k) price ceiling 92% of buyers say must crack before mass adoption.
Robotics State Grid Corp. of China just issued the single largest procurement order in the history of embodied robotics: 6.8 billion yuan ($994.7M) for 8,500 units in 2026. The mix is 5,000 quadrupeds, 500 humanoids, and 3,000 dual-arm wheeled manipulators — split among Unitree, Deep Robotics, AgiBot, UBTECH, and Fourier Intelligence, all five of which are pre-IPO. The first ten-billion-yuan vertical market for physical AI is the Chinese power grid, and the buyer is the state.
Robotics Lingyi iTech's Beijing super factory rolled its first batch of Tiangong Ultra and Tiangong 3.0 humanoids off the line on April 17. Stated capacity: 10,000 units in 2026, 20,000 in 2027, 500,000 by 2030. North American AI and robotics firms are already placing bulk ODM orders.
Robotics The 139th Canton Fair opened last week in Guangzhou with more than 70 humanoid-robot vendors. Same hall, same month, one year apart: prices have dropped from 700,000–800,000 yuan in spring 2025 to around 500,000 yuan now, with entry-level bipedal units at 200,000–300,000. The chart is the story.
Robotics On April 15, Unitree started selling its R1 humanoid on AliExpress for $6,800–$8,150 with free US shipping. Tesla's Optimus is still not shippable at any price. The humanoid-robot market just skipped right past 「early adopter phase」 and went straight to 「same checkout flow as an Instant Pot.」
Robotics On April 18, AgiBot pointed a camera at its G2 humanoid running an unedited 8-hour shift at a third-party tablet factory in Nanchang. 310 units per hour, above 99.5% task success, 140+ cumulative hours of stable operation. Two human stations are now one robot.
Robotics Beijing is hosting 100+ robot teams in a half-marathon this Saturday, and Unitree's H1 just hit 10 m/s on a track — 96% of Usain Bolt's world record pace. Your morning jog just became a competitive sport against machines.
Robotics It took Agibot nearly two years to build its first 1,000 humanoid robots. It took three months to build the last 5,000. The exponential curve just showed up for work, and it did not bring snacks.
Robotics Unitree's new H2 construction humanoid completed a 3,000 sq ft drywall job on a Shenzhen job site in 9 hours. A three-person crew would have taken three days. The general contractor has already ordered twelve more.