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For two years, humanoid robots were mostly a video format. A robot folds laundry, sorts parts or walks across a stage, and the clip goes viral before anyone asks how much of it was teleoperated. In the first half of 2026 the conversation finally moved to harder numbers: units shipped, factory output, and the first real price tags.
The signal is production, not choreography
The most useful way to read this market is to ignore the demos and watch who is actually building at volume. Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoids in 2025, more than every US competitor combined, and says it is aiming for around 20,000 in 2026. Figure has brought its BotQ line online and reports assembling its Figure 03 at roughly one robot an hour. Boston Dynamics has moved its electric Atlas from research clips into early deployments with partners including Hyundai.
None of that is a home robot. These machines are going to warehouses, factories and research labs, supervised, on narrow tasks. But production capacity is what turns a demo into a product, and for the first time several companies have it.
What you can actually buy today
For the first time, "buy a humanoid" is a real sentence with real prices:
- Unitree G1 — the most established option, shipping now from about $16,000 for the base unit, with education and developer configurations running far higher.
- Unitree R1 — a smaller, much cheaper model taking deposits from around $5,900, though units have not shipped yet.
- 1X NEO — the one explicitly pitched at the home, on pre-order at $20,000 outright or $499 a month, with deliveries slated for late 2026.
- Tesla Optimus — still not for sale. Tesla is scaling production for its own operations and has not opened consumer or business orders.
The marathon problem
Keep one counter-example in mind. In April, a humanoid from Honor reportedly won a half-marathon in Beijing in just over 50 minutes. Impressive engineering, and almost beside the point for a buyer. A robot that can run 21 kilometres tells you nothing about whether it can reliably load your dishwasher without supervision. Locomotion is largely solved. Useful, unsupervised manipulation in a messy home is not.
Our take for buyers
If you are a developer, a researcher or a business with a specific repetitive task, a Unitree G1 or a Figure-class machine is a genuine tool you can order in 2026. If you want a robot that folds the laundry and watches the kids, the honest answer is still "not yet, at any price." A $20,000 pre-order buys an early-adopter device and a software roadmap, not a finished home assistant.
We will keep judging these machines by what they do unscripted, and by units shipped rather than views racked up. Follow the releases in our newsroom, or see where the consumer-ready categories actually stand in humanoid robots and across every category we track.
