China's Unitree prices new humanoid robot at deep discount to 2024 model

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.