Astribot debuts $18,000 T1 humanoid in North America at IROS

Astribot's T1 humanoid, which starts at $18,000 in the US, made its North American debut at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh last week. The Shenzhen-based firm's robot stands roughly 1.55 meters tall, weighs about 66 kilograms and carries 23 degrees of freedom, with up to 5 kilograms of payload per arm.

The showcase at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center ran September 27 through October 1, with T1 demonstrating "autonomous tidying" of deformable objects into a backpack, powered by the company's Lumo-2 foundation model. Astribot's pitch is a "Design for AI" approach that treats three layers as one stack: the AI model, an embodied operating system that gives developers SDK and API access to joint control, motion and sensor data, and a cable-driven body built for "dexterity, compliance, and back drivability." Immediate delivery is available for US buyers.

The company is not promising real-time autonomous learning.

Instead, Astribot collects multimodal operations data, retrains Lumo centrally, then pushes updates over-the-air or on-site. At the second Astribot OS Hackathon in Beijing, which closed September 21, "15 teams developed and demonstrated more than ten functional applications" on T1 inside 36 hours.

$18,000 lands well under current North American humanoid list prices, extending a visible run of China humanoid pushes tracked in our robotics feed over recent months.