ergoCub vs Unitree H1

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

The Unitree H1 is a full-size bipedal humanoid (about 180 cm, about 47 kg, 18 DoF by Unitree's per-limb counts, 864 Wh swappable battery) sold mainly to research labs through quote-based sales: Unitree's store shows a $90,000 'contact us' anchor and a European distributor lists it from EUR 93,496 excluding VAT. Its strongest public evidence is locomotion and spectacle, including a company-claimed 3.3 m/s record, 1500 m and 400 m golds at the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games (6:34.40 and 1:28.03) and a second source crediting four track golds, a choreographed 16-robot national broadcast performance, and a company-claimed 10.1 m/s peak from a modified ~62 kg unit. Manipulation is weak: the stock robot ships without hands and with 4-DoF arms, and the manipulation literature (Stanford HumanPlus, CMU H2O) used heavily modified units. Unitree publishes no payload, runtime, failure-rate or deployment metrics; autonomy is asserted for walking and running only; third-party runtime figures conflict (1 h versus 2 h) and no independent benchmark or safety certification exists