Hardware Taxonomy

The machines you can point a policy at in 2026 split into five families: arms, humanoids, hands, tactile sensors, and the compute that closes the control loop. The price spread is the story. A self-build SO-101 arm costs about $122 in parts TheRobotStudio 2026SO-ARM100: Low-Cost Robot Arms for EveryoneTheRobotStudio, 2026. A Unitree H2 humanoid ships for $29,900 Unitree Robotics 2026Unitree H2 Product PageUnitree Robotics, 2026. Boston Dynamics will not sell you an Atlas at any price, and Tesla has no Optimus 3 price to quote because there is no product to buy RoboZaps 202638 Best Humanoid Robots in 2026RoboZaps, 2026. Between those poles sits an actual market with dated prices, disclosed degrees of freedom, and sourcing states you can plan around. This module collects the market into one filterable guide of 40 entries, and every number that nobody publishes stays visibly empty rather than estimated.

The buyer's guide

Three reading rules. Filters compose, so "preorder humanoids in the $1k-$10k band" is two clicks; the table answers it with exactly one row, the Bumi presale. Price buckets use the low end when a source gives a range, which is why the ALOHA 2 at $17,000-$32,000 sits in the $10k-$25k bucket. And every listed price carries an as-of date, because hardware pricing moved several times in 2026 alone, and a price without a date is already stale. An n/a cell marks a figure the source does not publish, and those cells sort last and filter separately by design.

Arms, from $122 to $70,000

The low end belongs to the LeRobot ecosystem. The SO-101 is a 3D-printed arm with six degrees of freedom, five joints plus a gripper, built from STS3215 servos; the community BOM for one follower arm runs about $100 in core parts and $122 including the US accessory list TheRobotStudio 2026SO-ARM100: Low-Cost Robot Arms for EveryoneTheRobotStudio, 2026. Seeed Studio sells the SO-ARM101 Pro line around it: $295 unassembled, $299 assembled, both with 12-bit magnetic encoders and a 500 g payload Studio 2026SO-ARM101 Pro KitsSeeed Studio, 2026. The older Koch v1.1 design still circulates at $250-$300 on Dynamixel servos alpibrusl 2026LeRobot ecosystem and hardware pricing (June 2026)alpibrusl, 2026. The LeRobot software stack runs ACT, π0, and SmolVLA policies on all of them, which is what makes a $299 kit a research instrument instead of a toy Face 2026LeRobot DocumentationHugging Face, 2026.

A tier up, Trossen Robotics rebranded its ALOHA line as Trossen AI in 2025-2026 and cut prices 30-34% across the board: the WidowX AI single-arm teleop rig now lists at $2,995, down from $4,545.95, and the Mobile AI bimanual-on-wheels rig at $22,995, down from $33,695.95 Trossen Robotics 2026Trossen AI Product Line (formerly ALOHA)Trossen Robotics, 2026. All of them run 500 Hz CAN FD control with the iNerve board and integrate LeRobot and OpenPI Trossen Robotics 2026Trossen AI Product Line (formerly ALOHA)Trossen Robotics, 2026. The ALOHA 2 itself, the bimanual rig behind ACT Zhao 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost HardwareTony Z. Zhao, Vikash Kumar, Sergey Levine et al., RSS 2023, 2023 and Mobile ALOHA Fu 2024Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body TeleoperationZipeng Fu, Tony Z. Zhao, Chelsea Finn, 2024, runs $17,000-$32,000 depending on configuration alpibrusl 2026LeRobot ecosystem and hardware pricing (June 2026)alpibrusl, 2026. At the top of the category, Pollen Robotics' Reachy 2 humanoid torso goes for about $70,000 alpibrusl 2026LeRobot ecosystem and hardware pricing (June 2026)alpibrusl, 2026.

One arm in the guide carries no price at all: the Franka Emika Panda, the seven-DoF platform behind DROID's 76,000 trajectories Khazatsky 2024DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation DatasetAlexander Khazatsky, Karl Pertsch, Suraj Nair, 2024. It remains the research workhorse, and sourcing it is a conversation rather than a checkout.

Humanoids: shipping beat shouting

Omdia counts about 13,000 humanoids shipped in 2025 RoboZaps 202638 Best Humanoid Robots in 2026RoboZaps, 2026. The dispute over who led says everything about the market's maturity: Omdia puts AgiBot first at 5,168 units and a 39% share, while Unitree self-reports more than 5,500 and disputes the ranking RoboZaps 202638 Best Humanoid Robots in 2026RoboZaps, 2026. Read both numbers as an order of magnitude.

Unitree owns the priced ladder. The R1 education robot runs $4,900-$5,900 across configurations. The G1 lists at $13,500 for the base model with 23 DoF; the EDU configuration spans 23-43 DoF and is available by quote Unitree Robotics 2026Unitree G1 Product PageUnitree Robotics, 2026. It is also one of the two validation platforms for NVIDIA's GR00T line, alongside AgiBot's Genie-1 RoboZaps 202638 Best Humanoid Robots in 2026RoboZaps, 2026. The H2 ships at $29,900 with 31 DoF (six per leg, seven per arm, three waist, two head), 360 N·m leg joints, and a 2,070 TOPS onboard chip Unitree Robotics 2026Unitree H2 Product PageUnitree Robotics, 2026. 1X prices the NEO at $20,000 outright or $499 a month against a $200 refundable deposit, with US deliveries promised by the end of 2026; the order page lists 22 DoF per hand, and a 25-DoF revision was announced on July 9 1X Technologies 20261X NEO Product Page1X Technologies, 2026. Noetix's Bumi opened presale at ¥9,998, about $1,400 at July 2026 conversion, with delivery still unconfirmed; EngineAI's SE01 launched at ¥88K (about $12,000), Fourier's GR-3 prices above ¥200K (about $27,500), and LimX's Oli takes orders from $21,800 RoboZaps 202638 Best Humanoid Robots in 2026RoboZaps, 2026.

The flagship tier publishes specs but not prices. Boston Dynamics' electric Atlas carries 56 DoF with continuous rotation at key joints, a 50 kg instant payload, IP67, and a 4-hour swappable battery, and every 2026 build is already committed to Hyundai and Google DeepMind Dynamics 2026Atlas Product PageBoston Dynamics, 2026. Figure 03 is in fleet production with an embedded palm camera per hand and 2 kW wireless charging through its feet, and it is not for individual sale Figure AI 2025Introducing Figure 03Figure AI, 2025. Agility sells Digit as a service with a 16 kg payload and deployments at GXO; UBTECH's Walker S2 hot-swaps its own batteries in about three minutes; AgiBot's A2 lists 40+ DoF; and Tesla's Optimus 3 has neither a price nor a current spec sheet RoboZaps 202638 Best Humanoid Robots in 2026RoboZaps, 2026.

The shakeout around them is real. K-Scale Labs shut down in November 2025, Cartwheel Robotics in February 2026, Sanctuary AI pivoted to software in June, and Amazon acquired Fauna Robotics in March RoboZaps 202638 Best Humanoid Robots in 2026RoboZaps, 2026. The companies still standing are the ones with shipping robots in this table.

Hands ship bundled, not shelved

Dexterous hands almost never sell as standalone products; they ride along with the robot. The open exception is the LEAP Hand from CMU: 16 DoF, buildable in about four hours from catalog parts at a cost of $2,000, roughly one eighth the price of the Allegro Hand it was benchmarked against Shaw 2023LEAP Hand: Low-Cost, Efficient, and Anthropomorphic Hand for Robot LearningKenneth Shaw, Ananye Agarwal, Deepak Pathak, RSS 2023, 2023.

Everywhere else, hand specs surface inside robot listings. The NEO's hands carry 22 DoF each, with the 25-DoF revision on the way 1X Technologies 20261X NEO Product Page1X Technologies, 2026. Unitree's Dex3-1, an option on the G1 EDU, has seven active DoF per hand (three thumb, two index, two middle) with an optional tactile array Unitree Robotics 2026Unitree G1 Product PageUnitree Robotics, 2026. The H2's dexterous hands are EDU-only options in several models Unitree Robotics 2026Unitree H2 Product PageUnitree Robotics, 2026. Figure 03 integrates a palm camera into each hand but discloses no hand DoF Figure AI 2025Introducing Figure 03Figure AI, 2025. If you want a hand to mount on your own arm in 2026, LEAP is essentially the whole catalog.

Sensors: touch is the missing channel

The major manipulation datasets ship vision and proprioception and nothing else; the tactile channel is absent from OXE, DROID, and AgiBot World alike Luo 2025Tactile Robotics: An OutlookShan Luo, Nathan F. Lepora, Wenzhen Yuan et al., IEEE Transactions on Robotics (accepted), 2025 Khazatsky 2024DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation DatasetAlexander Khazatsky, Karl Pertsch, Suraj Nair, 2024. The hardware is not the reason. A 2025 outlook in IEEE Transactions on Robotics puts the blame on structure: divergent transduction methods with no standardization, durability failures in real conditions, and calibration drift over time and temperature Luo 2025Tactile Robotics: An OutlookShan Luo, Nathan F. Lepora, Wenzhen Yuan et al., IEEE Transactions on Robotics (accepted), 2025. Sensors also add cost and failure modes to collection rigs, and few policy architectures take tactile input natively Luo 2025Tactile Robotics: An OutlookShan Luo, Nathan F. Lepora, Wenzhen Yuan et al., IEEE Transactions on Robotics (accepted), 2025.

Four sensors anchor the accessible tier, and none publishes a list price. GelSight Mini brings optical tactile sensing with high-resolution contact geometry to a commercial product Luo 2025Tactile Robotics: An OutlookShan Luo, Nathan F. Lepora, Wenzhen Yuan et al., IEEE Transactions on Robotics (accepted), 2025. DIGIT, Meta FAIR's compact optical fingertip, is an open design with public files and a broad replication record Lambeta 2020DIGIT: A Novel Design for a Low-Cost Compact High-Resolution Tactile Sensor with Application to In-Hand ManipulationMike Lambeta, Po-Wei Chou, Stephen Tian et al., IEEE RA-L, 2020. Its successor Digit 360 wraps the fingertip in 360° of optical coverage, resolves forces down to 1 mN across more than eight million taxels, and ships through GelSight under a manufacturing partnership announced in October 2024 Meta AI 2024Advancing embodied AI through progress in touch perception, dexterity, and human-robot interactionMeta AI, 2024. AnySkin takes the magnetic route: a soft, inexpensive skin whose learned policies transfer across replacement sensor instances without recalibration, the first uncalibrated tactile sensor to report that Bhirangi 2024AnySkin: Plug-and-play Skin Sensing for Robotic TouchRaunaq Bhirangi, Venkatesh Pattabiraman, Enes Erciyes et al., 2024.

Compute: closing the loop

NVIDIA built Jetson Thor specifically for this market. The T5000 module delivers 2,070 sparse FP4 TFLOPS with 128 GB of LPDDR5X at 273 GB/s on a 14-core Neoverse-V3AE CPU, in a 40-130 W envelope, rated 7.5x the performance of the AGX Orin it replaces; the T4000 trims that to 1,200 TFLOPS and 64 GB NVIDIA 2026Jetson Thor: Advanced AI for Physical RoboticsNVIDIA, 2026. Both are orderable through NVIDIA partners, and neither carries a published module price. The strongest signal that edge inference is the intended deployment path for humanoids is hardware: the 1X NEO's onboard computer is a Jetson Thor running at up to 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS 1X Technologies 20261X NEO Product Page1X Technologies, 2026.

Whether that compute closes the control loop is now a measured question. NVIDIA's VLA-Perf study ran π0 end-to-end across hardware and reported 19.0 Hz on Jetson Thor, 32.2 Hz on an RTX 4090, 162.5 Hz on an H100, and 314.4 Hz on a B100 NVIDIA Research 2026VLA-Perf: Systematic Latency Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models on Edge and Cloud HardwareNVIDIA Research, 2026. The bottleneck is the diffusion action expert's denoising steps, not action chunking, which adds negligible overhead. The study's verdict: 10 Hz control is achievable on Jetson Thor for π0-scale models, but 100 Hz needs architectural change, not faster silicon NVIDIA Research 2026VLA-Perf: Systematic Latency Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models on Edge and Cloud HardwareNVIDIA Research, 2026. The same paper prices the workstation tier at 2026 rates: RTX 4090 cards at $1,599-$1,999, A100 80 GB at $10,000-$15,000, H100 80 GB at $25,000-$40,000, while the B100 remained in limited supply as of August 2026 NVIDIA Research 2026VLA-Perf: Systematic Latency Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models on Edge and Cloud HardwareNVIDIA Research, 2026. The latency budgets these numbers feed are developed in Real-Time Execution.

How to read these prices

Three rules. First, the as-of date: prices in this guide were observed between June and August 2026, except the LEAP Hand's $2,000, which is its build cost at 2023 publication, and hardware pricing moved repeatedly during the year. Second, currency: yuan figures are converted at July 2026 rates, and the table note keeps the original amount so the conversion is auditable. Third, honest gaps: a null cell means the maker does not publish the figure. Tesla has released no Optimus 3 spec sheet, NVIDIA publishes no Thor module price, and Boston Dynamics does not sell Atlas. Those cells stay empty on purpose. What these machines are for, the data they collect and the policies they run, continues in Major Datasets and The Data Bottleneck.