ergoCub vs Leju Kuavo

ergoCub is IIT and INAIL's research humanoid, standing 150 cm tall, weighing 55.7 kg, and designed to reduce physical strain on workers in industrial and hospital settings. Its strongest evidence is a peer-reviewed Nature Machine Intelligence figure showing collaborative payload lifting with a human and live walking on stage. Official IIT sources confirm the 2023 debut and ergonomic purpose, while secondary dossiers report about 10 kg load-bearing, NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier plus Intel i7 onboard compute, depth/LiDAR sensing, and research claims such as up to 43% energy reduction and DNN-driven locomotion. However, no battery, runtime, walking speed, total DoF, hand DoF, price, or customer deployment exists in the reviewed evidence; autonomy is mostly simulation-only or title-only

Leju Kuavo is a family of full-size biped humanoids from Leju Robotics, with base KUAVO independently tested by CTTL at 45 kg, 26 DoF, 4.6 km/h pace, and 20cm jumps; KUAVO-MY variant is 1.4 m with >40 DoF. Leju's IPO filing reports 577 Kuavo units sold in 2025 for 178 million yuan. A public torchbearer event demonstrated 100m torch carrying and handover, but was explicitly teleoperated. Several YouTube titles suggest parcel delivery, household help, modular hands, and FAW factory work, but lack transcripts. No autonomous manipulation, runtime, battery, sensor, or hand specs were found in reviewed sources