Materials, manufacturing and cost

Three things set what a robot costs: how many you make, where you make them, and how many precision joints you put in. A Unitree G1's parts add up to about ¥41,574 (US$5,900) estimate. A Tesla Optimus Gen 2 built from Chinese suppliers comes to US$46,000 to 55,000, and the same robot with no Chinese parts about US$131,000 to 133,000 estimate. The gap is the cluster, the volume and the joint. This chapter shows you each one.

The cost of a robot on one screen

The bill of materials is the full shopping list of parts with a price next to each. It excludes the factory, the test, the warranty and the profit, so the selling price sits well above it. Unitree sells the G1 base for ¥85,000 including tax against that ¥41,574 parts list, and Unitree's whole company ran a 60.4% gross margin in 2025 verified. If you remember one ratio from this chapter, remember that one: in China the price of a robot is about twice its parts, and the parts are mostly joints.

What robots are made of

A robot body is a frame that must be stiff and light, joints that must be hard and precise, and a skin that must be soft and cheap. Each wants a different material. The frame is mostly aluminium, the gears and shafts are steel, the covers are glass-filled nylon, and the newest humanoids wear foam and fabric.

Property values and prices from the materials primer, 2024 to 2025 bulk pricing estimate. Commodity prices move 30% or more in a year, so read the prices as ratios.

Three material facts matter on a factory floor. First, "aerospace-grade aluminium" in a brochure means aluminium alloy 6061 or 7075, the standard bar any machine shop buys; the real aerospace content is the paperwork. Second, magnesium alloy is a third lighter than aluminium and die-casts well, which is why it turns up in housings. Third, carbon fibre is the stiffest per gram but is laid up largely by hand, so it pays only where grams are worth dollars.

Skins are where humanoids now differ most. Figure 03 is covered in soft textiles over multi-density foam at the pinch points instead of hard machined shells verified. 1X's NEO uses a 3D lattice polymer structure under a machine-washable nylon knit suit and weighs 30 kg verified. Xpeng's IRON wears a continuous soft skin with no visible joints verified. Soft skins are a safety choice for robots that work beside people, and they turn the cover from a moulded part into a garment that wears out and gets replaced.

Money follows material into the joints. Unitree spent ¥794 million on raw materials in 2025, and ¥403 million of that (50.8%) was mechanical parts, mostly custom machined and die-cast pieces verified. Gear steel, bearing steel and screw alloys carry the precision. About 70% of planetary roller screws use titanium or chrome-moly steels, only about five foundries make the aerospace-grade alloy, and precision steel lead times run 6 to 9 months unverified. That is one reason the planetary roller screw is the slowest part to scale (see Gears and screws).

How parts get made

Five processes make almost every part in a robot. Two of them, CNC machining and 3D printing, need no custom tooling: you send a file and pay for every part. The other three, injection moulding, die casting and stamped sheet metal, need a steel mould or die first, and then each part costs cents to a few dollars.

Numbers for a palm-sized 50 g bracket and general process ranges, from the materials primer (2024 to 2025 service-bureau and China pricing) estimate.

Choosing between them is one sum. Total cost is the tool plus the marginal cost times the number of parts. Per part, that is the tool divided by the volume, plus the marginal cost. A tooled process starts absurdly expensive and falls toward its floor; a tool-free process stays flat. The volume where the lines cross is the whole decision.

Robots live on the left of this chart for longer than phones do. Figure had delivered about 350 Figure 03 units by April 2026 and Unitree shipped about 5,500 humanoids in 2025 verified. At those volumes a humanoid is mostly machined and die-cast metal plus a few moulded covers, which is what Unitree's purchase ledger shows. Every product with 10 to 20 custom parts needs about US$100,000 to 500,000 of tooling before the first unit ships estimate, and that money is spent when you know least about what customers want.

Design for manufacture and tolerances

DFM (design for manufacture) and its twin DFA (design for assembly) are the rules that let a factory make your part cheaply and assemble it fast. The standard method, Boothroyd and Dewhurst's, asks three questions of every part: does it move relative to its neighbours, must it be a different material, and must it come apart for assembly or service? If the answer to all three is no, merge it into its neighbour. Fewer parts means fewer tools, fewer suppliers and fewer steps where a worker can get it wrong.

Precision is bought in steps. Every dimension on a drawing carries a tolerance, the wiggle room a part may have and still pass. For machined metal, ±0.1 mm is cheap; ±0.025 mm adds 30 to 100% to that feature; ±0.01 mm needs grinding and real measurement and costs 2 to 5 times as much; ±0.0025 mm needs lapping in a temperature-controlled room at 5 to 20 times estimate. One careless decimal place on a drawing picks which shops, and which country, can make your part.

Joints are where the tight tolerances live. A harmonic drive's flexspline, wave generator and assembly and test make up more than 70% of its unit cost estimate, because the teeth only mesh if the thin steel cup is machined and ground to microns. The G1's small joint is a 4-in-1 joint module (motor, planetary reducer, encoder and driver) with a hollow shaft for wiring estimate; every one of those fits is a tolerance someone pays for.

Assembly lines, test and yield

A robot factory has four jobs: check incoming parts, build sub-assemblies such as joint modules, run final assembly, and prove each robot works before it leaves. The best public description of a humanoid production line is Figure's BotQ: more than 150 networked workstations on custom manufacturing software, more than 50 in-process inspection points, and hundreds of suppliers qualified against incoming inspection verified Apr 2026. Figure says it went from one robot a day to one an hour, 24 times faster, in under 120 days, on a first line rated at 12,000 robots a year.

Yield is the share of units that pass. Burn-in testing runs each finished robot for hours before shipping so that parts destined to fail early (a weak solder joint, a bad encoder cable) fail in the factory instead of at a customer. No humanoid maker publishes its burn-in duration or yield. For a reference point from consumer hardware, cosmetic anodised aluminium parts historically run 60 to 90% first-pass yield through the mould, machine, blast and anodise chain estimate.

Capacity claims are everywhere; output is rarer. Agility's RoboFab in Salem, Oregon is 70,000 sq ft rated at 10,000 robots a year verified. 1X says its Hayward, California factory can build 10,000 NEOs a year unverified. Xpeng announced a 110,000 m² humanoid production base in Guangzhou's Tianhe district in Feb 2026 verified. Leju builds its Kuavo-5 at a Foshan plant at about one every 30 minutes, about 10,000 a year unverified. Compare every one of those with the roughly 150 humanoids each that Figure, Agility and Tesla shipped in 2025 estimate.

The humanoid bill of materials

Across every estimate, actuators are the biggest line: 40 to 60% of a humanoid's parts cost (about 56% for Optimus), then sensors at 10 to 25%, structure at 10 to 20%, compute and control at 10 to 15%, and battery at 5 to 10% estimate. Hands alone are about 17% of an Optimus, roughly US$9,500 a pair. Bank of America's 2030 split makes the point sharper: linear actuators 27%, rotary actuators 24%, dexterous hands 19%, and everything else about 30% estimate.

The G1 teardown puts numbers on each line: 23 joint modules at ¥27,500 (14 small ones at ¥1,000, 9 large at ¥1,500), a Livox MID-360 lidar at ¥3,840, an Intel RealSense D435i depth camera at ¥1,869, a Rockchip RK3588 compute board with memory at ¥1,415 and ¥3,000 of processing and assembly estimate. Inside one small 60 mm joint, the planetary reducer is ¥300, the motor ¥200, the encoder ¥200 and the structure ¥150. SemiAnalysis modelled a different G1 configuration at US$8,976 contested. Read both as a range and the conclusion holds: joints are half to two thirds of the robot.

Retail prices show the gap between a volume buyer and you. Leju pays about US$202 per actuated axis (US$156 for the module, US$46 for the driver) at about 36,000 modules a year estimate. On the open market, a DAMIAO DM-J8009-2EC joint is US$385, a MyActuator RMD-X8-25 US$450 to 480 and a ZeroErr eRob 80T from US$1,440 verified Sep 2026. A small company buying ten joints pays two to seven times what a scale buyer pays.

The cost-down curve

Cost-down is the steady cut in unit cost as volume grows and suppliers compete. Its rule of thumb is the learning curve: every time cumulative volume doubles, unit cost falls by a roughly fixed percentage. Leju's joint gives you a clean measured case.

One line in that table goes the wrong way. NVIDIA raised Jetson prices by up to 101% on 22 Jul 2026; the AGX Thor developer kit went from US$3,499 to US$5,499 verified. Observers blame memory prices. Compute is a 10 to 15% line in a humanoid today, and it is the one line a Chinese supplier cannot yet undercut for Western robots. Budget it rising.

Why China is cheaper

Wages explain the least. In Unitree's cost of goods, direct materials are 81.7% and direct labour 8.1% verified. Four other things explain the gap.

1. Cluster density. A Shenzhen, Dongguan and Huizhou maker finds its suppliers within about 200 km estimate. Tooling comes back in days, a failed part is redesigned the same week, and every component class has a dozen competing vendors. The Shenzhen and Dongguan cluster roughly halved world tooling prices estimate.
2. Car parts reuse. The electric-car supply chain already makes motors, magnets, screws, batteries and die castings at millions of units. Wuzhou Xinchun's planned roller-screw expansion is sized for about 80,000 humanoids plus 1.35 million cars estimate. Optimus's actuator Tier-1s, Sanhua and Tuopu, are car-parts companies, and Optimus V3 is about 70% Chinese content estimate.
3. Engineering and machine time. A CNC machine and operator costs about US$12 to 40 an hour in China against US$40 to 150 in the West, and an injection press US$15 to 40 against US$40 to 120 estimate. A Chinese mould at about US$9,000 against a Western US$40,000 moves the break-even volume 4x.
4. Vertical integration and speed. Unitree makes its own joint drives, mechanical structure and battery management, and designs its own planetary tooth profile to survive leg impacts; bought-in parts (cells, compute modules, memory, some sensors) are only 14 to 18% of its cost verified. SemiAnalysis estimates Unitree's in-house motors, gearboxes, lidar and cameras cost 30 to 40% of Western equivalents estimate.

OEM, ODM, contract manufacturing and the deal

You can build a robot three ways without owning a factory, and the words for them decide who owns the design and the tools.

Contract manufacturing is a thin business. Foxconn's net margin has hovered around 2 to 3% for a decade, and toolmakers earn 5 to 15% estimate. That thinness shapes every negotiation: the factory makes its money on volume and on your mistakes, so the contract terms matter more than the quote.

• Sample, prototype, small batch, mass production. A sample is one part to check; a prototype is a working unit; a small batch (tens to hundreds) proves the line; mass production is when the tools are hard and the price drops. Each step has its own price.
• Tooling ownership. Put in writing that you own the moulds you paid for and can move them. Toolmakers usually take about 50% up front estimate.
• MOQ. The MOQ (minimum order quantity) is the smallest batch a supplier will run. It is negotiable against a credible forecast.
• Quotes are opening bids. Tooling and piece prices flex 20 to 50% against volume commitments and competitive tension, and the first quote prices in how messy your drawing looked estimate.
• Cash float. Hardware pays out months before it gets paid: deposits, parts on 30-day terms, six weeks at sea, customers on 60 to 90 days. That is a 90 to 180 day gap on every unit estimate, so growing faster burns cash faster.

Certifications to sell in Southeast Asia

Certification for robots today is type testing before sale: a lab tests one design against a standard and you get a mark. Singapore's National Robotics Programme lists the standards that apply there, including SS 713:2025 for robots talking to lifts and doors, SS ISO 13482 for personal care robots and SS ISO 10218 for industrial robot safety verified. TÜV SÜD PSB tests robot safety in Singapore, and SGS tests robots in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines and issues ISO 13482 certificates; the labs test electrical, mechanical, functional safety, cybersecurity, EMC and performance verified. No recurring in-service inspection rule for service robots turned up in Singapore unverified.

Scope lines are plain summaries; the exact rules for robots in each Southeast Asian country were not verified for this primer unverified. Confirm with a lab before you import.

What makers already hold shows the usual set. Gausium holds ISO 9001, CE, UL and TÜV certificates verified. Figure's Figure 03 battery is UN38.3 certified and targeting UL verified. AgiBot says its A2 is certified for China, the US and the EU unverified. A robot with a radio inside needs the local radio approval in each country you sell into, and one with a battery needs UN38.3 before it can be shipped at all; see Compute, wiring and power for the battery shipping rules.

Terms in this chapter