ergoCub vs Tiangong Ultra

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

Tiangong Ultra is a bipedal humanoid research prototype from Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center (X-Humanoid), standing 1.8 m and weighing 55 kg (or 52 kg per BaiduWiki). It won the world's first humanoid half-marathon in April 2025 (21 km in 2:40:42) and has demonstrated climbing 134 stairs, navigating rough terrain, and sprinting 100m in reported times as low as 8.64s. However, autonomy is only claimed, manipulation and endurance specs are unknown, and the robot is not for sale. Strongest evidence is the half-marathon win with media coverage; weakest is missing manipulation, commercial deployment, and verified autonomy