Unitree G1 EDU vs G1 Standard: Is the SDK Worth the Extra Money?

A great deal is shared: height of 132 cm, mass of 35 kg, a runtime of about 2 hours, walking speed of up to 2 m/s and the same sensor set of a depth camera, 3D LiDAR and a microphone array. The differences start inside. The Standard has 23 degrees of freedom (DOF) and an 8-core processor, the EDU up to 43 DOF, 7 of them in the hand alone, and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin computer (NVIDIA Jetson). Payload rises from 2 to 3 kg, and knee torque from 90 N·m to 120 N·m. The top EDU configuration, “Ultimate D”, adds five-fingered hands with a sense of touch. What such a number of joints means in practice is explained in “Degrees of Freedom (DOF) in Humanoid Robots”. The decisive point, however, is software rather than hardware: the Standard has no SDK access, so you cannot run your own control code on it.

Unitree publishes the price of the Standard: USD 13,500 net, before tax and shipping, or about PLN 52,300 (≈ EUR 11,960) at 3.8762 zloty to the dollar. According to outside sources street prices reach as much as USD 19,000, depending on the sales channel. The EDU has no official price list (quotes on request). US resellers list twelve configurations from about USD 43,900 to 73,900, which is roughly 3.3 to more than 5 times the Standard; those figures come from sellers, not the manufacturer. In Poland the differences look milder. In late September 2026 the Basic version cost PLN 99,000 (≈ EUR 22,650) at Botland and x-kom (PLN 79,900 (≈ EUR 18,280) at Delta Robots), while EDU configurations ran from about PLN 149,900 (≈ EUR 34,290) (U1, Ceneo) through PLN 190,000 (≈ EUR 43,460) (U2, Botland) to PLN 250,000 (≈ EUR 57,190) (Edu Ultimate A, x-kom). X-kom also listed an item called “G1 EDU Standard” at PLN 175,000 (≈ EUR 40,030). The EDU is thus 1.5 to 2.5 times the price of the Basic in Polish shops. These are listing prices, so ask about software scope and warranty. We cover costs more broadly in “Humanoid Robot TCO: How to Calculate Total Cost” and “How Much Does a Humanoid Robot Cost in 2026”.

Only the EDU fits a university or laboratories: only it lets you load your own control algorithms and study grasping or locomotion. The Standard will do at events, in customer presentations and in a school, where the robot is there to show what humanoids can do rather than to be programmed. An overview of such teaching hardware is in “Educational Robots for Schools and Universities”. The EDU also brings more onboard compute (Jetson Orin), so your own perception models can run directly on the robot, whereas the Standard is limited to factory-set behaviours.