Buying guide
AEON vs Unitree G1 in 2026
Comparing 2 humanoid robots across availability, pricing, capabilities, and verified deployments. Current as of 2026.
Key differences
- Unitree G1 has more verified real-world deployments (2 vs 1).
- AEON is at the pilot stage; Unitree G1 at the research stage.
| Attribute | ||
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Hexagon | Unitree Robotics |
| Form factor | humanoid | humanoid |
| Maturity | pilot | research |
| Autonomy | — | — |
| Availability | internal-onlyenterprise | waitlistwaitlist |
| Price | Not announced | $13,500 (actual sale price) |
| Capability claims | — | — |
| Brain |
|
|
| Verified deployments | 1BMW Group | 2Japan Airlines, Japan Airlines |
| Privacy practices | — | — |
| Sources on file | 5 | 17 |
Editorial summaries
AEON
Hexagon's AEON is an industrial humanoid robot built for factory work such as assembly lines and high-voltage EV-battery manufacturing, developed with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and the Swiss actuator maker maxon. It carries 22 sensors and self-swapping batteries (about 23 seconds) for around-the-clock operation, with a walking speed near 2.5 meters per second. DEPLOY records it at pilot maturity with one verified deployment, at BMW Group Plant Leipzig: the honest counterpoint to aggregator 'humanoids are working in factories at scale' framing, this is a verified pilot, not commercial-at-scale. As industrial equipment sold to manufacturers, it has no consumer price.
Unitree G1
The Unitree G1 is a research and developer humanoid platform at a sub-enterprise price point, sold into university labs, hardware-research groups, and individual developers rather than enterprise integration contracts. The category distinction matters: a G1 at a research bench is in its intended environment; treating G1 in active research use as commercial deployment overstates Unitree's commercial position relative to Apollo, Digit, or Atlas. Unitree describes G1's autonomy as developer-platform capability for capability research, with the published specs (degrees of freedom, payload, runtime) as the verifiable substance; commercial deployment hours at named customer sites are not yet part of G1's record.
Common questions
- What is the difference between AEON and Unitree G1?
- AEON and Unitree G1 are both humanoid robots on the DEPLOY registry. They differ in maker, maturity, price, verified deployments, and how much of their autonomy is independently verified. See the table above for the full head-to-head; each figure is sourced.
- Which has more verified deployments, AEON or Unitree G1?
- Unitree G1 has more verified deployments (2) on the DEPLOY registry than AEON (1). DEPLOY counts a deployment only when confirmed at a named site with a primary source.
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