When he speaks, he sounds like a regular guy. His creator, Bartosz Idzik, describes him as "not super intelligent, but very emotional, very easy to make friends with." When he stops talking, it becomes harder to forget what he is: a four-foot-tall humanoid robot wandering the streets of Poland.
What changed when it started talking
Six months ago Idzik and his friend Radosław Grzelaczyk decided to buy a humanoid robot from China. They named it "Edward Warchocki" after Grzelaczyk's dog Eddie and the Polish word for growling, "warczeć" — and because it sounds like a passable Polish name.
For the first few days Edward could not speak, and people were visibly scared of it. Idzik, a software developer, wired the robot to a large language model, giving it live conversation in Polish. "When he started to talk, people loved him. Without talking, it's just a 40-kilogram machine," Idzik says.
Edward made friends fast. It visited the Polish parliament and talked to politicians, hiked up mountains, waded into a lake and was jokingly arrested by the police. In April a video of it chasing wild boars in Warsaw, armed with a backpack and a Rolex, went viral worldwide. It now has more than 1 million followers and 4 billion views across social media.
All the same device
In 2026 you have almost certainly seen at least one of these humanoid influencers doing the rounds. There is "Rizzbot," which wears a cowboy hat and flirts with passersby in Austin; "Bart Robot," which breakdanced with Knicks fans in New York; and the "Brickell Clanker," which changed jerseys to party with World Cup fans after each game.
Unless you have been paying close attention, you may not have realised they are all the same model. The Unitree G1 is one of the most available and affordable humanoid robots on the global market, built by a Chinese company leading the robotics industry.
The G1 is roughly the size of a child, with a hollowed-out face ringed by blue light and light-grey aluminium limbs. It has appeared on a talent show, demonstrated kung fu, boxed, run parkour, danced at concerts, run with children, tried and failed to cook, streamed live, been ordained as a monk in Japan and Korea, and prayed at a mosque in Dubai.
Not in the lab, in the field
Unitree lists on the Chinese stock market in about two weeks. Its financial disclosure shows how well the products are selling: unlike most robot companies whose products are still being tested in labs, more than half of Unitree's 2025 revenue came from delivering humanoid robots to real customers.
- Humanoid robots delivered in 2025: 5,511
- Average selling price: under $25,000
- Share of sales outside China: 43 percent
- The company became profitable for the first time last year
Idzik's verdict captures where the industry stands: "We tested a lot of humanoids, and the G1 was the best for its purpose. We are used to China copying other countries, but from that perspective..."