Unitree H2‑X: a kung fu humanoid pitched as a guardian
On the evening of 21 October, Melbourne time, Unitree Robotics introduced the H2‑X Kung Fu Legend Guardian, a martial arts version of its H2 humanoid. Unitree describes it as having “powerful performance to serve and guard you” and gives it a maximum endurance of about eight hours.
There is no Australian price or release date for it yet. Unitree has not published a price, a full spec sheet or a list of countries for the H2‑X.
What Unitree showed
The launch film runs for about a minute and opens with a note that it is real footage with no speed-up. Most of it is shot in a car wrecking yard at night. The robot kicks and punches the door of a parked car hard enough to dent it, jumps onto a car roof and flips back down, and jumps off the top of a shipping container labelled as a four metre high platform. There are spinning kicks, backflips and a sequence in a shower of sparks.
Unitree’s H2‑X film on YouTube
The guardian scenes
The second half of the film is where the name comes from. In a staged scene outside a house, the robot steps in between a woman and an intruder holding a weapon. In another, it braces the front of a car while a man pulls a dummy out from underneath. It also pushes a child-sized dummy out of the path of a moving car and is run over itself.
These scenes are labelled as demonstrations with props. The film does not say how much of the robot’s movement was controlled by people and how much it did on its own, so they show what the body can do more than what the robot can decide to do.
How it compares with the H2
Unitree has not published separate specifications for the H2‑X. The H2 it is based on is 1.82 metres tall and weighs about 70 kilograms with its battery. It has 31 joints, leg joints rated to 360 newton metres of torque, and a quick release 15 amp hour (0.972 kilowatt hour) battery. Unitree lists the H2’s battery life as about three hours and its price as US$29,900, before tax and shipping.
The eight hours quoted for the H2‑X comes with a qualifier. The on-screen text in the film puts it as standing for approximately eight hours, which is a different measure from eight hours of kicking and flipping.
Safety
The film closes with Unitree’s own warnings. It describes the stunts as extreme testing and asks people not to imitate them, asks owners not to make dangerous modifications or use the robot in a hazardous way, and asks that people keep at least two to three metres away from the robot. Unitree also says the humanoid robot industry is at an early stage worldwide, and that anyone buying one should understand its limitations first.