Humanoid robot kits and DIY builds, sorted by budget

The entire humanoid robot kit market fits between free and $13,764.35, and almost everything worth buying sits in a narrow band from about $400 to $1,200. That band buys a servo biped roughly 40 cm tall that walks, sees through a camera, and runs about an hour before it needs a charge. Below the band you get plans and a parts list. Above it you get a knee-high research platform that costs more than a full-size humanoid, which is the strangest thing about this category in 2026.

Every price here came off the maker's own store.

The ladder

Kit	Maker	Price (Aug 2026)	Size / joints	What it teaches
Otto DIY plans	Otto DIY	free (GPL-3.0) plus parts	desktop, 4 servos	Arduino, a first walk cycle
InMoov plans	Gael Langevin	free plus filament and servos	life size, legs do not walk	3D printing, servo wiring, patience
Reachy Mini Lite	Pollen Robotics	$399	28 cm, 6 DOF head	Python SDK, cameras, mics, LLM apps
Reachy Mini Wireless	Pollen Robotics	$499	28 cm, onboard Pi	same, untethered
H5S	Hiwonder	$429.99	36.6 cm, 16 DOF	servo choreography, no camera
Tonybot	Hiwonder	from $459.99	38.3 cm, 17 DOF	ESP32, Arduino, Scratch, Python
TonyPi	Hiwonder	from $599.99	37.3 cm, 18 DOF	Raspberry Pi 5, OpenCV vision
AiNex	Hiwonder	from $729.99	41.5 cm, 20 to 24 DOF	ROS, inverse-kinematics gait
TonyPi Pro	Hiwonder	from $889.99	37.3 cm, 18 to 20 DOF	grasping, stairs, hurdles
ENGINEER Kit 1	ROBOTIS	$1,138.50	builds a MAX-E1 humanoid	DYNAMIXEL servos, CM-550 controller
OP3	ROBOTIS	$13,764.35	51 cm, 20 DOF	ROS 2, C++, arrives assembled

Free: the plans are the product

If your search was "how to build a robot at home," the answer starts at zero dollars, because the two best-known DIY humanoids are open-source projects rather than products.

Otto DIY is the small one. The Arduino libraries are published under GPL-3.0 on GitHub and target the Arduino Nano family, with example sketches for dance moves, obstacle avoidance and app control. You print the shell, buy the servos and the board, and end up with a palm-sized biped that shuffles. I am not quoting a price for the pre-boxed version, because Otto's own store refused every request I made to it (HTTP 403), and I do not print prices I cannot load.

InMoov is the big one, and it carries the best deflating fact in this piece. Gael Langevin started it in January 2012 as the first open-source 3D printed life-size robot, and the build guide splits it into hand, forearm, shoulder, torso, head and neck sections, all printable on a 12 x 12 x 12 cm bed. Then you reach the legs page, titled "Legs Non Motorized". The life-size open-source humanoid does not walk. It is a very impressive torso on a stand, and building it will teach you more about servo wiring and print tolerances than any kit on this page.

$399 to $1,170: the band that actually makes sense

Reachy Mini from Pollen Robotics is the 2026 arrival. It is $399 tethered to your Mac or PC, $499 with onboard Raspberry Pi compute and a battery. Both ship as DIY kits, Pollen says assembly runs about two hours, and the lead time on the order page is up to 90 days. Read the spec table before you get excited: head movement with 6 degrees of freedom, full body rotation, two animated antennas, four microphones, a wide-angle camera. No arms. No legs. It is 28 cm tall and weighs 1.5 kg. Buy it as the cheapest respectable body for AI experiments, with a Python SDK and an app ecosystem attached. Do not buy it expecting a walking machine. Pollen publishes the whole build, so you can watch what those two hours involve before you order.

For walking, the volume seller is Hiwonder, whose kits flood the first page whenever anyone searches Amazon for a humanoid robot. The ladder is tidy. The H5S at $429.99 is 16 servos, an STM32 and Bluetooth, with no camera in its spec list: a dancing robot. Tonybot at $459.99 adds an ESP32 and Arduino, Scratch and Python support across 17 joints. TonyPi at $599.99 puts a Raspberry Pi 5 and a 480p camera on 18 joints, which is where computer vision enters. AiNex at $729.99 to $999.99 is the one a robotics student should look at: ROS on 20 to 24 serial bus servos with a real inverse-kinematics gait, 41.5 cm tall, 2.45 kg. TonyPi Pro at $889.99 to $1,169.99 adds opening hands, stair climbing and hurdle crossing.

Those are the specs that sell. Here are the two that do not appear in the headline: TonyPi's stated working time is about 60 minutes per charge, and AiNex's stated walking speed is 21 cm/s, which is roughly a sixth of an adult's normal pace. You are buying a slow, short-winded, 2 kg machine, and that is fine, because the point is the code you write for it.

Above $1,138: where the kit market breaks

ROBOTIS is the Korean maker whose DYNAMIXEL servos are the reference standard for hobby and research robots. Its ENGINEER Kit 1 is $1,138.50 and builds, among other configurations, a MAX-E1 humanoid on a CM-550 controller. Its ROBOTIS MINI, the classic 16-servo hobby biped, is listed at $620.89 and marked "end of life, and is no longer available to be purchased", with two units left in stock.

Then there is the OP3 at $13,764.35: 51 cm tall, 3.5 kg, 20 joints on XM430 servos, an Intel NUC i3 inside, ROS 2 support. It also arrives fully assembled, per the package contents list in ROBOTIS's own manual, so calling it a kit is generous.

Now put that next to the tracker. A Unitree R1 is $4,900 and, per Unitree's own store page, stands 123 cm, weighs about 29 kg, and is "ready to use right out of the box, requiring no tedious calibration." A Unitree G1 is $13,500, still less than the OP3. Chinese bipeds undercut the research-kit tier so thoroughly that the expensive end of this market now exists mostly for labs already committed to a ROBOTIS toolchain. If your budget is five figures, read how much a humanoid actually costs before you buy a 51 cm one.

The fine print nobody reads

Hiwonder's public Warranty and Returns page states a 30-day return window, with the buyer paying return shipping unless the fault is a manufacturing defect. The warranty term lengths are not on that page at all. They appear in Hiwonder's own replies to buyer questions in the Q&A on the AiNex and TonyPi Pro product pages: 3 months on servos and motors, 6 months on circuit boards, controllers, sensors and the battery, 12 months on metal brackets. The parts that wear out first carry the shortest cover. Shipping is free over $499 on Hiwonder's store, which quietly nudges you up a tier.

What none of them can do

No kit on this page does a chore. A 1.8 kg aluminium biped on hobby servos has effectively no payload, the same servo torque arithmetic that leaves a $3,349 desktop robot arm rated at 600 grams. Grasping remains the hardest unsolved problem in the field, which is why hands are the spec to watch rather than joint counts. Anyone selling a sub-$1,000 humanoid that tidies a room is selling a video.

What these kits deliver is a syllabus: servo control and gait tuning at the H5S end, OpenCV and inverse kinematics in the middle, ROS 2 and vision-language experiments at the top. At $729.99 for a walking ROS platform, that is cheap by any historical standard.

So: Reachy Mini at $399 if you want to write AI apps and do not care whether it walks. Hiwonder AiNex at $729.99 if you want a walking ROS biped and are willing to learn. A $4,900 Unitree R1 if you skipped past kits entirely, covered in the cheapest humanoids you can order. And if a kit turns up on Amazon below the maker's own price, check the seller first: that search page is mostly resellers and action figures.