Robots are no longer exclusive to laboratories and factories and are coming directly to the consumer, sold online through AliExpress with a starting price of around $4,900, Unitree Robotics is about to launch its new humanoid robot to the global market with that value that completely changes the rules of the game.

The new model called R1 was designed to be accessible, compact and surprisingly capable, with a little more than 1.20 cm of height around 25 kg and dozens of degrees of freedom it can execute complex movements, including running and even acrobatics, but the most important thing is not what it does today, it is what it represents, because by placing a functional humanoid robot in a global marketplace, Unitree is not just selling a product, it is creating a brand and an ecosystem.

Researchers, developers and even enthusiasts can now have access to a real robotics platform for a fraction of the traditional cost and that accelerates everything, more people experimenting means more ideas, more ideas mean more evolution and more evolution means that this technology will advance at a speed that perhaps not even the companies themselves can foresee.

And the figures show that this is already happening, because while Western companies are still producing humanoids without limited volumes, Unitree has already shipped thousands of units in a single year and now by opening the doors to the global market it can scale this even more aggressively.