DroidUp's Moya humanoid robot, explained

The Moya humanoid robot is a 1.65 m, roughly 32 kg biped with heated silicone skin, built by Shanghai DroidUp, and Chinese coverage puts its first batch at 1.2 to 1.5 million yuan, which is about $177,000 to $222,000 at the 6.7634 rate on 2026-08-07. Fifty units, presale scheduled for Q4 2026. You cannot put one in a cart, there is no Western distributor, and after July 28, 2026 there is no clean way to import one into the United States.

Every maker figure below was read off droidup.com.

Moya status box

• Maker: Shanghai Droidup Robotics Co., Ltd. (上海卓益得机器人有限公司), Zhangjiang, Shanghai. Founder Li Qingdu, quoted by New Atlas on 2026-02-04
• Orderable: No. droidup.com has no store, no price, no cart. There is a sales address (sales@droidup.com) and an inquiry form
• Reported price: 1.2 to 1.5 million yuan, first batch of 50 units, presale in Q4 2026 (IT之家, 2026-01-31)
• Announced: Shanghai, late January 2026. DroidUp calls it "the world's first fully biomimetic embodied intelligent robot"
• Size: 1.65 m, about 32 kg
• Skin: silicone, held at 32 to 36 C
• Sold for: reception, exhibition, cultural performance, education, aged care. Not chores, not a home assistant
• Independent hands-on: none I can find. Everything published so far is trade-show floor footage and vendor material

Who DroidUp is

Not a shell, not a rendering studio. DroidUp's site lists a Shanghai address in Zhangjiang, four department email addresses, a partner program, and a news feed running back to WAIC 2024 with dated entries for trade shows, university tie-ups, municipal visits, and a Pre-A+ round of nearly 100 million yuan (close to $15 million) posted on 2026-02-26.

The catalogue is where it gets interesting. DroidUp's product page carries exactly two lines: a bipedal humanoid, 行者二号 (Walker II), and a facial-expression robot called 睿娜 (Ruina). Moya is on the homepage, in the newsroom, and on the trade-show circuit. As of 2026-08-07 Moya is not in the product catalogue at all. Nothing sinister in that. It is the ordinary signature of a machine that has been announced and not yet productized.

The skeleton underneath

Moya's chassis is reported as Walker 3, premiered at WAIC 2025 per DroidUp's own newsroom entry dated 2025-08-01. DroidUp publishes no Walker 3 specification, so the closest thing to a real spec sheet is the previous generation, and that one is worth reading.

Walker II is a tendon-driven machine. DroidUp calls it "the world's first modular humanoid robot based on biomimetic tendon-drive technology," with tendons and distributed motors working together instead of a motor parked at every joint. The spec page lists 170 cm, 32 kg, 40 kg payload, 5 kg per arm, 30 degrees of freedom, 15 cm obstacle clearance, 30 degree slopes, 6 hours of dynamic endurance, and energy consumption "25% lower than competitors."

That same page gives two different top speeds. One line says maximum step speed 9 km/h. Another says 3 m/s, which is 10.8 km/h. Same page, same day. If you are budgeting around locomotion numbers, note that the vendor has not settled on one.

The endurance figure got tested in public, which is rare enough to matter. Walker II entered the world's first humanoid half marathon at Beijing E-Town on 2025-04-19, and DroidUp's newsroom headlines the result 季军, third place, with the best endurance in the field. Our read on what those races prove applies without modification: a 21 km finish measures legs, thermals and battery, and says nothing about hands.

What the price buys

Spec	Moya	Walker II
Height	1.65 m	170 cm
Weight	about 32 kg	32 kg
Body degrees of freedom	16	30
Head drive units	25	not applicable
Skin	silicone, 32 to 36 C	none
Endurance	not published	6 hours dynamic
Top speed	not published	"9 km/h" and "3 m/s" on the same page
Price	1.2 to 1.5m yuan (press reports)	not published

Moya figures from IT之家 (2026-01-31); Walker II figures from DroidUp's spec page.

Read the two columns side by side and the money becomes legible. Moya has fewer body joints than the robot it descends from and more hardware in its head than most humanoids carry in a whole limb. The 1.2 million yuan buys the face and the skin. Walking got solved cheaply, by tendons, and Unitree will sell you a biped that does it for $13,500.

For scale on the other side: 1X's Neo asks $20,000 or $499 a month for a home humanoid you are supposed to live with. Moya's entry price is close to nine Neos. Different product, different buyer, and the buyer is a museum, a bank lobby, a university, or a care facility procurement office. Our full price ladder has the rest of the tiers.

What it does, and what is a claim

The sourced part, from IT之家's launch write-up (2026-01-31) and the two English reports that followed: 25 high-precision drive units in the head, 16 degrees of freedom in the body, silicone skin held at 32 to 36 C, elastic material across the body that DroidUp says attenuates 90 percent of collision force, a large language model the company says it developed itself, multi-turn dialogue with scenario memory, and a walking posture the company puts at 92 percent similarity to a human.

Treat that 92 percent as a marketing artifact. No published methodology, no independent measurement, no definition of what is being compared to what.

Outside observers describe something narrower and more useful. Interesting Engineering (2026-02-03) reports the robot smiling, nodding, holding eye contact and reproducing micro-expressions, with online reactions split between impressed and unsettled. New Atlas, the next day, called the walk uncanny and compared it to moving in heels while rating the interaction as the strong part. That is a fair summary of every lifelike android I have tracked: the face lands and the gait gives it away.

DroidUp's 2026 newsroom reads like an events calendar rather than a delivery log: MWC26 with ZTE (2026-03-06), TCT and AWE2026 (both 2026-03-19), SIA (2026-06-09), WAIC (2026-07-20), plus an item headlined Moya going abroad. Those are all stages. I can find no dated record of a Moya working at a paying customer site.

Buying one from outside China

You cannot, in any straightforward sense, and for Americans the door has closed further.

There is no export price, no distributor, no cart, no published lead time. The route is an email to sales@droidup.com and a conversation in which you are a procurement department rather than a person. For a machine at this price with a first batch of fifty, that is normal, and it means every number on this page is a list number rather than a transacted one.

Then the harder blocker. On July 28, 2026 the FCC adopted a determination that foreign-made advanced robotic devices, humanoids and quadrupeds included, pose unacceptable national security risks, and stopped issuing new equipment authorizations for them. The Robot Report's coverage (2026-07-29) notes the ruling "does not affect sales, marketing, or use of devices already acquired or models that have already received FCC equipment authorization." Moya was announced in January 2026 with no US channel, which is exactly the case the determination catches. The wider picture for every Chinese maker is in our consumer map.

One thing to not confuse it with

Search the robot's name and a token site trading on it comes up high. DroidUp's own site, product pages and newsroom carry no mention of any coin, token or public offering, as of 2026-08-07, and DroidUp is a privately funded Chinese company whose last announced raise was that Pre-A+ round in February 2026. Anything selling you exposure to Moya is selling you something other than exposure to DroidUp.

What I am watching

Three things. Whether the Q4 2026 presale opens on schedule and at the quoted range. Whether Moya reaches the product catalogue with a spec sheet, which is the moment an announcement becomes a product. Whether any Walker 3 numbers get published, because right now the most impressive verified thing about Moya is a battery result its predecessor posted on a Beijing road in April 2025.