NUPIAO | Song Jianan
UBTECH’s latest full-size hyper-realistic robot, the U1, has been turning heads — and raising eyebrows. The top-end U1 Ultra male version comes with a jaw-dropping 990,000 yuan price tag, but the battery only lasts two to four hours. In other words, it can’t even make it through a single night. Cue the internet backlash.
On July 6, UBTECH responded to NUPIAO, explaining that almost all full-size humanoid robots on the market right now run on that same 2–4 hour battery window. “This is the norm across the industry,” a spokesperson said. They also clarified that the consumer-facing bionic robots are mainly the half-body U1 Lite and the high-spec full-body U1 Pro. The U1 Ultra, with its high-dynamic capability, is designed for commercial scenarios.
UBTECH was also keen to stress that the bionic robot is all about emotional companionship — a direction they say is encouraged and recognized at the national level. It’s not a boyfriend, girlfriend, or “partner” in the romantic sense.
With the current lack of mature standards or industry consensus on humanoid robot ethics, the company says it has stepped up. “We’ve already put a proactive governance mechanism in place,” UBTECH noted. “We established an AI and Robotics Ethics Committee that covers everything from product R&D and industrial design to manufacturing, marketing, sales, and real-world deployment.”
On June 30, UBTECH launched the “U World U1 Series” full-size bionic robots. This is the company’s first mass-produced model aimed at the consumer emotional-companion market. It comes in three tiers: the lightweight half-body U1 Lite at 119,800 yuan, which only has an upper body for interaction; the standard full-body U1 Pro at 169,800 yuan, with a complete limb structure; and the top-spec high-dynamic U1 Ultra, available in both female (880,000 yuan) and male (990,000 yuan) versions. The Ultra is the only one that can actually walk on its own and perform full-body micro-expression syncing.
According to UBTECH, total orders for the U World U1 series across online and offline channels have already topped 13,361 units, and the company is racing to start deliveries this year. UBTECH founder and CEO Zhou Jian revealed that the production target for the U1 series in 2027 is at least 50,000 units.
“If I opened the floodgates, we could sell 30,000 to 50,000 this year,” Zhou said, “but I’d rather focus on delivering these 10,000-plus units properly first.”
The U1 Pro, which is already in production, is a full-size 1:1 humanoid design with male and female body types. The male version stands 183 cm tall and weighs 42 kg; the female version is 168 cm and 35.2 kg. It has a complete head, neck, torso, and limbs. Compared to the half-body U1 Lite, the Pro can do full-body static pose interactions, but it still can’t walk on its own two feet.
The U1 Pro packs a total of 88 bionic motion degrees of freedom (24 active, 64 passive). The face alone has 33, supporting multi-angle head tracking. The robot can mimic about 90% of human static gestures, so it can handle close-contact interactions like hugging, leaning, sitting, and lying down.
What’s really wild is the full-body high-precision flexible bionic silicone skin. It micro-replicates human pores, veins, and fingerprints, with a constant body surface temperature of 37°C to feel like real skin. Underneath, multi-dimensional flexible electronic skin sensors detect touch force and location, picking up signals from hugs, strokes, and other physical contact. On the brain side, it runs a Resonance-LM emotion model trained on Huawei’s Ascend framework, optimized for long-term emotional companionship. The robot uses a bionic fast-slow brain dual architecture, spitting out instant emotional responses within 500 milliseconds and recognizing more than 50 nuanced human emotions.
Compared to the U1 Lite, the U1 Pro fills in the missing limbs and upgrades physical interaction and full-body tactile sensing. But compared to the U1 Ultra, the Pro lacks autonomous walking, high-dynamic dance moves, and broad mobility.
As for battery life, the U1 Pro tops out at 4 hours on a full charge, takes up to 90 minutes to charge from zero, and supports use while charging.
Research from TrendForce and other public data shows that the mainstream global humanoid robots mostly lock in at that 2–4 hour battery window. Most battery packs are under 2 kWh, squeezed by the triple constraints of lithium-ion energy density, overall weight balance, and the tight internal real estate of the robot’s torso. For example, Unitree’s H1 humanoid has a 0.864 kWh battery and runs for just under 4 hours in static, low-movement conditions. Tesla’s Optimus Gen2 packs a 2.3 kWh high-nickel ternary battery system, but during continuous walking and carrying tasks, it lasts only about 2 hours.
According to China News Weekly, Cai Bingzhen, head of the Gaogong Robot Research Institute, said that every consumer electronics product goes through the phase UBTECH is in right now. The next step is optimization. In his view, the current U1 buyers are mostly early-adopter geeks who don’t treat it as a functional product — it’s more about trying something new.
The “China Humanoid Robot Industry Development White Paper (2025)”, jointly released by EVTank and the Yiwei Institute of Economics, points out that 2025 is the kickoff year for humanoid robot mass production. Full-year shipments are expected to surpass 20,000 units, with a market size close to 9 billion yuan. But the power and energy system is the weakest link in the whole chain. Solid-state batteries, new lightweight actuators, and intelligent BMS energy management are the three core tech directions for breaking the battery bottleneck. The industry widely expects that it will take another 3 to 5 years of iteration before consumer-facing humanoid robots can reliably deliver 8 hours or more of stable runtime.
Still, institutions are bullish on the future of China’s humanoid robots. Morgan Stanley recently raised its 2026 China humanoid robot shipment forecast from 28,000 to 50,000 units, a 78.6% jump, and now expects shipments to hit 446,000 by 2030 — a compound annual growth rate of 106% from 2025 to 2030. Among these, companion robots, including bionic ones, are the fastest-growing segment in the consumer market.
Some industry insiders argue that for companies like UBTECH, the real test will be whether actual delivery rates, user retention, and repeat purchase and recommendation numbers over the next six months meet expectations. Those metrics will decide whether the companion bionic robot industry truly breaks out or just flickers out.
