Reachy 2 vs Unitree H1

Reachy 2 by Pollen Robotics (now part of Hugging Face) is a purchasable open-source upper-body humanoid on an omnidirectional wheeled base. Official specs list 7-DoF arms with ~3 kg payload each, 136-166 cm adjustable height, up to 50 kg, stereo RGB-D, LiDAR, and ROS 2 + Python SDK. Press reports a $70,000 price and use at Cornell, Carnegie Mellon and major AI labs. It is explicitly a lab robot, not consumer, and is teleoperated or Python-controlled; no autonomous or reliability evidence was found. YouTube demos are title-only and cannot be used for capability inference

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