AEON vs Unitree H2 in 2026

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 H2

The Unitree H2 (from Unitree Robotics, Hangzhou) is a full-size humanoid, the successor to the H1, and one of the rare Chinese humanoids with a verified, openly-published consumer price: $29,900 (China-direct, ex-customs). It has 31 degrees of freedom (up from the H1's 27): a new 3-DoF waist, 7-DoF arms, a quasi-serial leg and foot redesign, and a bio-inspired animated face new to the H-series.

It is about 1.82 meters and 70 kilograms with battery, with a roughly 3-hour battery, Intel Core i5/i7 base compute (an EDU variant offers NVIDIA Jetson), and a walking speed under 2 meters per second, down from the H1's roughly 3.3, trading speed for dexterity. DEPLOY records it at commercial maturity (for-sale with a published price), not production (no fleet-scale deployment).

A critical cap-flag: the H2's marquee demos (dance, boxing, gala performances) are choreographed or teleoperated (via a control rig or Apple Vision Pro), not verified-autonomous; autonomy is the goal, not the present state. The $29,900 is a China-direct ex-customs price, not a US landed price, and the '2070 TOPS' figure is the optional EDU Jetson, not the base unit.