You say that now, but wait until one of these is charging at you across a field with a QBZ-95 strapped to its back and a 1024 resolution thermal sensor.
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I'd be more scared of MQ-9 dropping a JDAM or R9X on my head than this thing running around. They're proven to be undetectable to human targets. That's scarier to me than this thing running around catching wires and bushes.
I’m just a regular person and even I can see use for this where it carries all my gear on a very long hike or when I go camping. I’m sure that alone would be extremely valuable to any military. Also, not everything is aerially accessible. Lots of tight spaces in urban combat where you need to get get inside structures and interact with physical things like doors that drones just don’t have the physical strength for and probably never will.
Guys, guys:
>> High Payload:
>> Static 150 kg;
>> Continuous walking payload approx. 16 kg
And on top of that:
>> Long Endurance:
>> Unloaded 3h+ (>33 km);
>> Loaded > 2h (>16 km)
16 kgs for two hours max is not "extremely valuable to any military". It's hardly even valuable to a leisure camper. You might be able to get this to carry some of your stuff if you go on a short hike, but if you were thinking of going camping and having it carry your camping gear, you can forget about it.
Okay. If a military uses it they’ll probably load it up with more batteries and make it bigger and beefier. All the necessary components are there and they will scale.
A bigger and beefier machine will also be much less nimble. The whole point of this robot is that it can travel at speed over rough terrain but that's in large part enabled by its light weight. If you eliminate that, it's just a wimpy quadruped. Nobody's going to "scale" that up, they'll just use a bigger platform, forget about rolling downhill, and get it over with.
There's already plenty of systems like that, e.g. Ukraine's TW 12.7 [1] or even the MAUL used in rescue missions [2].
What is the niche targeted by Unitree with this robot? What are they selling, exactly; and to whom?
It's worth asking those questions if one wants to go beyond the excitement of watching a cool demo, and towards understanding the state of the art in robotics. Lots of cool videos of robots doing all sorts of impressive stuff around, but those are heavily edited and carefully curated to show what the vendor wants to show. The question is how much of that ends up in use in real-world situations, from homes, to roads to battlefields. The answer usually is: very little.
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[1] https://theconversation.com/ukraines-killer-robots-show-how-...
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/11/17/robot-coff...
An industrial 15000 mwh 50v lithium pack can run 3 kg, so you could bring 8 hours of spare walking and a solar panel…
you could power e e cummings for 3 fortnights
Excuse me what?
So now we have a robot that walks a bit longer and... does nothing else? What's the point?
mq9 ~$20m price tag will buy a LOT of robodogs with machine guns able to exterminate disproportionally more people per $ and time unit.
Not this robot. You can see that none of the videos where the robot is careering downhill or rolling fast over rough terrain shows it carrying any load at all. Since those are the best-of, carefully curated videos, painstakingly chosen to show off the system's capabilities at its best you can rest assured that the robot can't manoeuvre like shown in the videos with any load at all.
There's a video where it's going uphill over uneven terrain with a load at a much slower pace, which is the same as what Big Dog could do 21 years ago, and another one where it's shown rolling up a smooth, grassy slope while loaded, which is pretty meh.
And that's just carrying a load. Now, you want it to carry an assault rifle and fire it? Like, at enemy targets? And hit them?
You will need to wait for a couple of major breakthroughs in robotics and AI still, I'm afraid.