HUBO 2 Plus

What it's for

The HUBO 2 Plus was never meant to stand at an assembly line or in a home. It is a laboratory robot, built so that other scientists could use it to learn to walk, keep their balance and work in an environment made for people. Unveiled in January 2011, it stands 130 cm tall, weighs 43 kg and runs for about 2.17 hours on a single charge, which is as long as a solid experimental session with a break to change the battery.

The platform made it possible to study walking on real, bipedal hardware and not only in a simulator: it was used for research on locomotion, whole-body control and manipulation. According to the data we have, its stated uses are research and the context of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, with the caveat that the latter concerns mainly the earlier generations of the HUBO line and not the HUBO 2 Plus itself.

Industrial use is limited. In a factory this robot will find no work, because it has no documented payload or parameters that would allow a comparison with today's industrial humanoids. In a warehouse, a restaurant or a hospital, no either, because nobody has tested it there in public. Its real "application" today is different: it is a reference point for historians of robotics and for engineers who want to understand where modern designs came from. Anyone studying “How Does a Humanoid Robot Work” will find in the HUBO 2 Plus a textbook example of a complete, electric bipedal robot from before the era of foundation models.

If you are looking for a humanoid robot to work on a shop floor, look at the category “Humanoid robots” or at the article “Humanoid Robots in Factories 2026”. If you are interested in science and teaching, you will find more suggestions in universities and laboratories, which is exactly where this line of designs had its place.

Who it's for

The audience is practically only people who deal with the history and development of humanoid robotics. If you are writing a paper on the evolution of bipedal robots, preparing a lecture or editing a study of Korean robotics, the HUBO 2 Plus is a rewarding starting point: well documented, with a clear lineage and a concrete influence on later companies.

A poor fit: For anyone who is thinking of buying. The model has no price, is not sold as a consumer product and is not available in Poland. Neither a school, nor a company, nor an academic team looking for a robot "off the shelf" will be able to buy it. Nor will you find parameters here such as degrees of freedom, payload or walking speed: the manufacturer does not state them, and we do not fill gaps with guesses.

If your goal is a research platform that can really be ordered, look at Unitree G1 as the cheapest full-size entry point or at LimX Oli. If you want to see what a modern robot of industrial class looks like, go to Kawasaki Kaleido 9. And if you work at a university and wonder what equipment works well in teaching, read “Educational Robots for Schools and Universities”.

Deployments

Outside Poland the story is more interesting: by 2012, 11 of the 15 units produced went to research teams in the USA, Japan, Singapore and China, and four stayed in Korea. These are strictly research deployments, not commercial ones: nobody bought a HUBO 2 Plus to put it on a production line.

In our catalog we have no documented deployments in services, warehouses or hospitals. If you want to see where humanoids really work today, read “Humanoid Robots in Factories 2026” and “Polish Robotics Companies”, which are a better guide to the market than a single platform from 2011.

Because the HUBO 2 Plus is a historical platform, we choose alternatives by asking: "what would a team that once reached for the HUBO use today?"

Rainbow Robotics HUBO-2: a direct descendant of the same line, developed by the company that grew out of KAIST. If you are interested in where this design led, start here, but remember that there are no public specifications or price.

Unitree G1: a humanoid that is actually available, at about PLN 51,900 (≈ EUR 11,870 at NBP rate 4.3716 of 20 October 2026) (roughly USD 13,400), with an open environment for researchers. Today it is the closest equivalent of a "cheap platform for gait experiments".

HRP-5P: a Japanese research prototype from 2018 (182 cm, 37 degrees of freedom), also not commercially available. Good for comparing approaches: Korea versus Japan.

Kawasaki Kaleido 9: shows what a bipedal robot working at human scale looks like today: 190 cm, 99 kg, 18 kg payload.

LimX Oli: a full-size research humanoid with an open SDK, on which people work today the way they once worked on platforms from the HUBO family.

The HUBO line began at KAIST in Daejeon with the KHR-3 HUBO and Albert HUBO in 2005. Four years later, in 2008 to 2009, came the HUBO 2, also known as Jaemi HUBO. The HUBO 2 Plus, shown in January 2011, is the last publicly documented generation of this research family.

The most interesting chapter came right after the unveiling. In February 2011 the spin-off Rainbow Robotics separated from KAIST, and by 2012 it had produced a small series of 15 units of the HUBO 2 Plus. Eleven of them went to teams in the USA, Japan, Singapore and China. It is a rare case: an academic platform turning into an export product, although it never reached ordinary retail.

A common error is also worth correcting. Sources that mention control based on Windows XP with an RTX card refer to the earlier Albert HUBO from 2005, not to the HUBO 2 Plus, so we do not attribute that specification to it. Anyone who wants to trace the later fate of the line will find it in Rainbow Robotics HUBO-2 and in the profile Rainbow Robotics, and an introduction to the institution's background in Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.