Chinese Tech Company Reveals Robot Companions For Sale (With An Eye Watering Price)

If you're looking for a robot companion and you have somewhere between $17,000 and $146,000 burning a hole in your pocket, UBTech Robotics has just what you need. The China-based tech company recently unveiled its UWorld U1 Series, a line of life-sized, hyper-realistic robot with silicone skin and human features. UBTech is mainly known for commercial and industrial robotics, but these new humanoid robots are meant to offer companionship, including physical assistance, social assistance, lifestyle aesthetics, and emotional support. The robots are able to recognize 20 emotional states with over 90% accuracy through voice, gestures, and interaction, and they are capable of exhibiting up to 90% of basic human movements.

They are for adults only, which raises some eyebrows, and come in tiers basic (Lite) to high-end (Ultra), hence the price range. The high-end models are 990,000 yuan or roughly $146,000 with the cheapest at 119,800 yuan or $17,600. Pre-orders opened June 30, and the first shipments are expected in September, if the company delivers. An on-stage presentation mixed the various robotic models and real human actors, meanwhile demos use generative AI to represent the robots. Scenes show an AI model genuinely using a phone — "hit me up if you want to talk" — and holding the off-screen viewer's hand. Another scene, also GenAI, shows a female model frolicking on a sunny beach with its owner. Although, modern robotics companies are no strangers to odd presentations, earlier this year, Unitree's robots were part of a demonstration that felt like a sci-fi nightmare or fever dream.

Collectively, the U1 Series makes use of an end-to-end technology stack, with physical hardware — like the biomimetic skin and system-level manufacturing under-the-hood — and intelligence hardware, using a proprietary operating system, and emotion-driven large language models (LLMs) for processing. UBTech claims the intelligence powers a "biomimetic fast-and-slow brain architecture" which draws on cognitive neuroscience to enable extremely fast, 500-millisecond, response times along with deep reasoning and reactivity. There are a lot of buzzwords there, but these robots should be capable of a wide variety of applications from hospitality and customer service to elder care, to education and in-house domestic services.

Though, these aren't the first "humanoid" robots to market, they appear to be some of the first that are intelligently advanced, on the software side. The Walker C and Walker S1 are also full-size humanoid-like robots from the company, albeit meant to provide customized hospitality or commercial services. They straight-up look like robots, however. Another human-like robot that sparks the uncanny valley feel in your home is Moya, from DroidUp. Altogether, China has so many humanoid robots it had to create a unique ID system for them all.

UBTech also introduced its "Human-Robot Companionship Initiative." China has a large population of adults living in isolated conditions, over 90 million adults living alone and 118 million empty-nest seniors. In addition, 10% to 20% of them suffer from mental health disorders, such as dementia or severe depression, who may require attentive emotional and physical care. UBTech says: "Combined with multimodal situational awareness, the robots are designed to provide structured psychological support services." The company plans to donate 100 of its U1 Series models to mental well-being programs in 2026.