en.Wedoany.com Reported - On May 12, 2026, China's Unitree Robotics officially released the GD01, the world's first mass-produced manned transformable mech, with a starting price of 3.9 million yuan. The product is officially defined as a civilian vehicle. With a total weight of approximately 500kg when manned, it supports seamless switching between an upright humanoid form and a quadrupedal form. It features a built-in cockpit, allowing the driver to sit inside and control the mech to perform a full range of actions, including walking and transforming.
The GD01's body structure is built with high-strength alloy materials and equipped with a precision servo drive system, ensuring structural robustness while maintaining movement flexibility. In a demonstration video, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing personally sat in the mech's cockpit, controlled the GD01 to walk forward, and smashed through a brick wall with a single punch, visually demonstrating its power output level. In its upright state, the mech is approximately 1.6 times the height of a human, giving it an extremely prominent visual presence. It is currently the largest humanoid manned mechanical device publicly known to be mass-producible.
Beyond upright walking, the GD01's core differentiating capability lies in its form switching. The mech can quickly transform into a quadrupedal state by pressing backward and downward, continuing to move with a four-legged gait. Throughout the entire transformation process, manned operation remains unaffected, and the form transition is smooth and continuous. In quadrupedal mode, the machine's center of gravity is further lowered, correspondingly enhancing its ability to traverse complex terrain, providing the physical prerequisite for traveling on unpaved outdoor surfaces. Currently, Unitree has not disclosed the GD01's battery life or power parameters.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Hangzhou, China, with Wang Xingxing as its founder, Unitree Robotics is the world's largest shipper of quadrupedal robots. The company's product line covers consumer-grade robot dogs, industrial-grade quadrupedal robots, humanoid robots, and the newly released manned mech. Its B2 series industrial quadrupedal robots have previously been deployed at scale in fields such as power inspection and fire rescue. In March 2026, Unitree submitted an IPO application for the STAR Market to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, planning to raise 4.202 billion yuan by issuing no less than 10% of its shares, corresponding to a valuation of approximately 42 billion yuan. The company ranked first globally in humanoid robot shipments in 2025, with an estimated annual revenue of 1.708 billion yuan.
The GD01 is Unitree's highest-priced product to date, far exceeding the roughly 1.09 million yuan price tag of its previous B2-W industrial wheeled-legged robot dog. In May 2026, Unitree opened its first national direct-sale flagship store at Intime in88 on Beijing's Wangfujing Street, displaying consumer product lines such as the G1 and R1 humanoid robots (priced from 80,000 to over 100,000 yuan) and the Go1 and Go2 robot dogs (priced from 10,000 to 20,000 yuan). The GD01, as a new flagship product, is not yet included in the store's display range. In the same month, Unitree launched UniStore, the world's first humanoid robot task and motion application store, platformizing robot motion programming and function expansion to continuously lower the barrier to entry for developers and users.
Mass-produced manned mechs remain a rare category globally. Unitree's previous B2-W industrial quadrupedal robot had been verified as capable of carrying a human rider, but the B2-W lacked an enclosed cockpit, did not have transformation capabilities, and lacked active power output. The GD01 represents a leap forward from cockpit-less riding to enclosed cockpit control, and from a single quadrupedal form to switchable humanoid and quadrupedal forms. The mech's pricing naturally targets high-end private transportation, cultural tourism displays, and specialized operations. However, as a new type of vehicle, the classification of manned mechs in various countries' road regulations, road access permit conditions, and safety certification standards remain undefined, and Unitree has not yet commented on the progress of regulatory adaptation.
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