Unitree G1 vs Unitree R1: The Established Standard Meets the New Budget Contender

The R1 is smaller and lighter: 123 cm tall and about 29 kg, against 132 cm and 35 kg for the G1. It does have more degrees of freedom (DOF), 26 against 23 on the G1 Standard, although sources quote anywhere from 20 to 26 for the R1 depending on the variant. Unitree presents it as a robot capable of dynamic moves, including a sideways flip. The R1’s sensing consists of cameras and a microphone, and its software rests on the manufacturer’s own multimodal stack. The G1 has a 3D LiDAR and an RGB-D depth camera, an 8-core processor, a 9000 mAh battery with fast hot-swapping and about 2 hours of runtime. Its payload is 2 kg, walking speed about 2 m/s and knee torque up to 90 N·m. For the R1 the manufacturer states no payload, speed or battery capacity, so that part of the comparison stays open. How to read such gaps is explained in “How to Read a Robot Datasheet”, and the difference between joint count and motion quality in “Degrees of Freedom (DOF) in Humanoid Robots”.

The base G1 costs USD 13,500 net, or about PLN 52,300 (≈ EUR 11,960) at 3.8762 zloty to the dollar. In the official Unitree shop all R1 variants (Air, Standard, EDU) were listed at the end of September 2026 uniformly at USD 4,900, about PLN 19,000 (≈ EUR 4,350); before that the price list ran USD 4,900, 5,900 and 10,500. In dollars the R1 is thus almost 2.8 times cheaper. In Polish shops the gap narrows: the R1 cost PLN 41,900 (≈ EUR 9,580) at Delta Robots, while the G1 Basic cost PLN 79,900 (≈ EUR 18,280) there and PLN 99,000 (≈ EUR 22,650) at Botland and in the x-kom range. An older x-kom entry priced the basic R1 at PLN 46,000 (≈ EUR 10,520) and the R1 EDU Professional in configuration G at PLN 78,500 (≈ EUR 17,960) (other EDU configurations reached PLN 130,000–140,900 (≈ EUR 29,740–32,230)). The spread is wide, so before buying check which variant you are getting and with what SDK scope. These are listing prices from late September 2026. Total costs are worked out in “Humanoid Robot TCO: How to Calculate Total Cost”, and a market overview is in “How Much Does a Humanoid Robot Cost in 2026”.

The R1 lands in the hands of people who learn by trial and error: in a school or universities setting, where an affordable humanoid for motion-programming classes matters, and at events, where a striking show counts for more than payload. It is neither a household nor an industrial device: with no declared payload, a factory is out. The G1 makes sense where known endurance and LiDAR are needed, for example in a laboratory testing navigation, and with the EDU variant added, in research on your own algorithms. An overview of teaching hardware is in “Educational Robots for Schools and Universities”.