While the West continues its love affair with the money to be made from getting generative AI to do things for which it is manifestly unsuited, on the other side of the Pacific, it’s all robot everything. Not to be put in the shade by Honor and their marathon robot, Chinese robot company Unitree—you may remember them from such other automatons as the Lunar New Year kung fu dervishes and, um, the Jackass robot—have upped the ante with their latest creation, which is a freaking giant half-ton transforming mech suit. The GD01 stands a good ten feet tall, can switch between bipedal and quadrupedal forms, and can be yours for a piddling $650,000. (Rumors that “GD” is an abbreviation of “Gundam” remain unconfirmed.)
And look, we have questions about this. For a start, you’d think that $650,000 would get you a more comfortable… cockpit? Driver’s seat? What do you even call the bit where you sit in a mech? Anyway, whatever it’s called, the GD-01’s version looks cramped and ergonomically challenging. You’d also think that Unitree could swing a sheet or two of plexiglass, but perhaps staying dry is reserved for the deluxe edition. Also, the rubber padding over the metal tubes at the front of the cockpit thingy: are they not just chopped-up bike tires? They are, aren’t they?
The truly confusing thing about this design, however, is what happens to the person operating the robot when it transforms. To shift into its quadrupedal form, the contraption bends backwards in a frankly disconcerting manner, pivoting a full 90º at the hips until its arms are touching the ground. You can witness this process in the video below (it starts at about 0:48):
So, unless we’re missing something, it seems that if you were sitting facing forward pre-transformation, you’d end up with your knees pointing at the sky. This feels suboptimal. But the quadrupedal form does look significantly more stable than the bipedal one, so maybe just stick with that. (The video dodges this question by having someone get into the robot after it’s finished its transformation.)
And underlying all this are the most fundamental questions: Why? Who is this for? What is it for? (Apart from knocking down inconveniently placed cinder block walls that happen to completely lack mortar, apparently.) Is anyone going to drop $650,000 on this beyond the usual rogues’ gallery of Instagram tech scions and once-removed dynastic failsons? And Mr Beast? I mean, who knows, maybe that’s enough for Unitree to reap a decent return on its investment—or maybe this is just a prototype/proof of concept for an actual Gundam, in the same way the first MacBook Air was a terrible machine that worked as a sort of overpriced public beta test for far superior iterations on the basic design.
Whatever the case, we look forward to the inevitable video of some tech dickhead in San Francisco walking up to the In-N-Out Burger drive-in in his personal mech to annoy the staff with his oh-so-quirky order.
And that’s it for today’s news—wait, what’s that? You’re not entirely sure the world needs rich people stomping around in questionably designed giant wall-smashing robots? Oh! Well, fear not, oh anxious one: you’ll be happy to know that Unitree’s official Twitter account has your back: it goes out of its way to ask politely that everyone “be sure to use the robot in a friendly and safe manner.”
