Galbot ET1

Galbot ET1 is a small bipedal humanoid robot made by the Chinese robotics company Galbot. Galbot introduced it at the 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing on August 19, 2026 as its first bipedal model and as a hardware platform for its AstraBrain-Agent embodied-agent architecture.^[1][2][3] The robot's Chinese name is "Yinhe Xingzai" (银河星仔, roughly "Galaxy Star Kid"), often shortened to "Xingzai".^[5][9]

ET1 is distinct from the company's Galbot G1, which has a humanoid upper body on a wheeled base, and from the heavy-load Galbot S1. At launch, Galbot had not published an ET1 data sheet, price, ordering process, production schedule, or delivery date.^[1][2][3] It later posted a specification table on its website, opened pre-orders on September 3, 2026, and QbitAI reported on October 2 that it would come in three versions priced at 79,000, 139,000 and 179,000 yuan.^[9][10][12] Galbot's product page describes ET1 as a humanoid robot for entertainment and performance.^[9] As of early October 2026, Chinese press reports described the robot as still in the pre-order stage, with large-scale delivery not yet under way.^[13][14]

Specifications

Galbot's ET1 product page lists the following figures. They are manufacturer specifications and have not been independently measured.^[9]

Galbot's product page, as fetched on October 19, 2026, does not list payload, battery capacity, runtime, walking speed, or joint torque.^[9] PCauto described the body as covered in soft material on the outside for safer contact with people.^[13] An earlier TMTPost analysis gave the height as 1.23 m and the weight as 30 kg, slightly below the figures on Galbot's page.^[11]

Unveiling

Galbot unveiled ET1 during the World Robot Conference, which opened in Beijing on August 19, 2026. Xinhua's Economic Information Daily reported the model among a group of Galbot robots shown in household, retail, and industrial demonstrations. China Daily described ET1 as Galbot's first bipedal humanoid and photographed it beside the wheeled G1.^[1][3] According to Jiqizhixin, ET1 made its first appearance at a Galbot forum on embodied-AI models held at the conference on August 19, where it danced and then interacted on stage with "Xiaogai", the Galbot robot that had appeared on the Spring Festival Gala. The company's exhibition booth was C104.^[16] GeekPark described ET1 as a "small" bipedal humanoid released at a sub-forum of the conference.^[15]

The company's official YouTube channel released a 49-second video titled "Meet GALBOT ET1." on August 20. The video is promotional footage and contains no technical specifications or test protocol.^[4] Other footage from the conference showed ET1 performing a street-dance sequence that included floor-supported and inverted movements alongside a human dancer. Reports attributed claims that the robot generated or tracked motions in real time to Galbot and its founder, rather than to an independent test.^[2][5] IT Home quoted Galbot founder and chief technology officer Wang He calling Xingzai "the world's first physical agent with autonomous learning ability", a company claim.^[5]

AstraBrain-Agent

Galbot describes AstraBrain as an embodied AI system intended to coordinate robots with different bodies. Its public demonstrations at the conference included bipedal ET1 units, wheeled G1 units, and heavy-load S1 units. The company says AstraBrain supplies higher-level environmental understanding and task planning while body-specific control systems execute movement.^[1][2]

For ET1, Galbot named the relevant architecture AstraBrain-Agent. According to the company, it combines continuous observation, spoken-instruction interpretation, behavior planning, and motion-sequence generation for real-time interaction. Galbot also says people can teach the robot new movements through interaction without first supplying motion-capture recordings or prepared action videos.^[2][3]

Galbot's website presents AstraBrain as three layers: a "cerebrum" World Action Model (WAM) of 3 to 13 billion parameters for task semantics and long-horizon planning, a "pons" latent projector, and a "cerebellum" Transformer of 80 to 300 million parameters for real-time whole-body control at 100 to 250 Hz.^[17] GeekPark reported that Wang He said at the launch that the publicly described AstraBrain-WBC 0.5 had been succeeded internally by AstraBrain-WBC 1.0, which was being previewed on ET1. In GeekPark's account of the dance demonstration, ET1 extracted a dancer's motion trajectory from vision and mapped it onto its own body rather than replaying a stored routine.^[15]

Galbot's figures for the human-motion data behind this model have varied. GeekPark reported about 100,000 hours of human motion data in August 2026, combining motion capture with motion retargeted from internet video, while QbitAI's October 2026 report gave a figure on the order of 1,000,000 hours.^[12][15] Neither figure has been independently audited.

These descriptions are company claims about the architecture. Galbot had not released an AstraBrain-Agent paper, checkpoint, training corpus, source code, evaluation suite, or ET1-specific technical report by August 28, 2026. The public demonstrations do not show how much of a behavior was generated online, how much was learned before an event, or whether unseen tasks can be acquired reliably. They also do not establish continuous real-time learning during ordinary deployment.^[2][3]

Public demonstrations

World Robot Conference

At the launch event, ET1 appeared in a dance performance with a human dancer and demonstrated bipedal whole-body movement. Chinese reporting described eye contact, small head movements, responses to language, and dance movements that included hand-supported floor work and an inverted pose.^[2][5] These observations document a stage demonstration. The associated claims that the routine had no preset script and that ET1 learned or reproduced the dancer's movements in real time came from Galbot and were not accompanied by an outside test protocol.^[2][5]

GeekPark also described a retail demonstration in which ET1 was given only the goal "help her sell more" and then, according to the company's framing, planned its own approach and approached customers to promote snacks.^[15] A TMTPost analysis described a similar scenario in which the robot chose a "dance to attract, then sell" strategy, performing street dance before promoting drinks to the crowd it drew.^[11] QbitAI reported that in an earlier demonstration ET1 used a natural-language instruction to have a Galbot G1 fetch drinks in a retail setting.^[12]

Some conference reports grouped household demonstrations such as folding clothes, washing, and serving food with the broader Galbot display. They did not always identify which robot body performed each task. Those demonstrations should not be assigned to ET1 merely because ET1 appeared at the same exhibition. Galbot's wheeled G1 and other robots were also present.^[1][2][3]

Tennis demonstration

ET1 units appeared in a tennis exhibition during the opening ceremony of the second World Humanoid Robot Games on August 22, 2026. CGTN published photographs identifying a Galbot ET1 practicing with a technician on August 21 and ET1 units practicing before the event. Its report described a Galbot robot playing singles and doubles with human participants, moving into position and returning shots.^[6] IT Home, citing CCTV News, named the tennis robot "Yinhe Xingzai" and reported that it played mixed doubles with actor Li Yunrui and tennis player Zheng Jie. The same report gave the tennis robot's height as about 1.75 m, which does not match the 1,250 mm on Galbot's ET1 specification page; the reports do not explain the difference. IT Home also said the robot ran Galbot's LATENT control algorithm, and reported a 90.9 percent forehand success rate in testing, stable rallies of more than 20 shots, and a stereo vision system able to lock onto balls traveling faster than 50 km/h within 0.1 seconds; these figures were not independently verified.^[18]

Galbot characterized the match as autonomous and later claimed more than 100 consecutive rallies. CGTN repeated the company's account that a higher-level system assessed the game while a lower-level controller coordinated walking, balance, and racket movement.^[6][7] No independent technical audit, machine logs, rally definition, miss rate, intervention record, or controller configuration accompanied the public demonstration. The event supports that ET1 robots physically participated in a live tennis exhibition, but it does not independently validate Galbot's autonomy or record claims.^[6][7]

Galbot's earlier LATENT research provides relevant background but should not be conflated with ET1 documentation. The LATENT paper describes learning tennis skills from imperfect human motion fragments and reports deployment on a Unitree G1 robot, not on Galbot ET1.^[8] It does not establish that the conference ET1 used the same policy, training data, or exact control stack. The paper was a finalist for, and according to Sina Finance won, the IROS Best Entertainment and Amusement Paper Award at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh on September 30, 2026.^[19][20]

China Open

During the 2026 China Open tennis tournament at Beijing's National Tennis Center, a Galbot humanoid played tennis with members of the public near the Yingyue (Moon) Court at several times each day, switching between forehand and backhand and getting back up after falls. A Galbot representative told the Beijing Daily that it was the same model that had played Zheng Jie at the World Humanoid Robot Games, upgraded to cope with outdoor wind and lighting.^[21] The report did not name the model, and QbitAI's ET1 pricing article also referred only to "Galbot robots" at the tournament.^[12][21]

Pricing and pre-orders

Galbot's website lists a news post dated September 3, 2026 announcing that pre-orders for "Xingzai" were open, and the ET1 product page links to a JD.com listing.^[9][10] According to TMTPost, Galbot announced on September 4 that pre-orders had passed 200 units within 24 hours, more than 100 of them through JD.com.^[11] These are pre-order figures reported by the company, not deliveries.

On October 2, 2026, QbitAI reported the three versions and prices:^[12]

QbitAI placed the starting price between the consumer and professional humanoid segments, which it estimated at 20,000 to 30,000 yuan and 120,000 to 200,000 yuan respectively.^[12] PCauto said the robot targets home companionship, entertainment and science-education uses as well as tourism venues, retail promotion and exhibitions, and named AgiBot, Unitree and UBTech robots as competitors.^[13]

Relationship to other Galbot robots

Before ET1, Galbot's most visible robot was the wheeled G1, used in the company's retail, pharmacy, and manufacturing demonstrations. G1's wheeled base and lifting torso suit structured indoor work, while ET1 uses legs and was introduced through athletic and interaction demonstrations.^[1][3] Similar names used by other manufacturers, including Unitree G1, refer to unrelated robots.

Galbot also displayed its S1 heavy-load robot at the same conference. Reporting about tasks assigned to G1 or S1, or results obtained with a Unitree G1 research platform, is not an ET1 specification.^[1][2][3]

QbitAI reported that Galbot and Unitree Robotics carried out joint development and that ET1 uses a Unitree motor solution.^[12] TMTPost described this as part of a strategy of concentrating research on the "brain" while using mature Unitree hardware, and wrote that Galbot was a major Unitree customer that accounted for more than 18 million yuan of Unitree's 2025 sales.^[11]

Reception

Commentary after the pricing announcement focused on whether ET1 could move beyond performance. A TMTPost analysis titled "Galbot still can't do without performance" argued that most of the scenarios Galbot promoted for ET1 involved a show element, and that ET1's small size implied pressure on battery life during demanding activity.^[11] PCauto listed the low entry price and multi-body model reuse as strengths, and short battery life, a body not developed in-house, dependence on Unitree's supply chain for joints and repairs, and unproven reliability as weaknesses.^[13] The Beijing News cited ET1's 79,000 to 179,000 yuan pre-order prices as part of a wider fall in humanoid robot prices, noted that the robot was still at the pre-order stage, and argued that buyers were starting to judge humanoids on pricing, endurance and repairability rather than dancing or stunts.^[14]

Evidence limits

The launch evidence consists mainly of company material, stage demonstrations, event reporting, and state-media coverage that relies in part on Galbot descriptions. No independent laboratory evaluation, repeatability study, safety assessment, or production inspection was available. Public footage can verify that a physical biped moved, danced, and participated in a tennis exhibition under event conditions. It cannot by itself determine whether behaviors were fully autonomous, learned during interaction, robust to unplanned conditions, or transferable to other tasks.

Galbot's statements about autonomous learning, unscripted interaction, and future deployment should therefore be read as the company's technical and commercial claims. Announced prices and pre-orders do not show that units have been delivered, and demonstrations at controlled events do not establish readiness for unsupervised work around people.^{[2][6][7][14]} Some third-party robot directories have published ET1 figures that conflict with Galbot's own page; Humanoid.guide, for example, lists 173 cm, 65 kg and 48 degrees of freedom while marking the entry "Not verified".^[22]

References

1. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8Yan Lei. "Galaxy General releases bipedal humanoid robot at WRC." Economic Information Daily, Xinhua, August 19, 2026. jjckb.cn/...c
2. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12 ^13Xinhua. "2026 World Robot Conference opens in Beijing; Galbot releases bipedal humanoid robot." August 21, 2026. xinhuanet.com/...c
3. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9Bai Shuhao. "Galbot unveils sporty new humanoid model." China Daily, August 21, 2026. global.chinadaily.com.cn/...87ef90a3106bc57421cc5e
4. ^Galbot. "Meet GALBOT ET1." YouTube, August 20, 2026. youtube.com/watch
5. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Wang Miao. "Galbot's first bipedal robot Galbot ET1 makes its debut." IT Home, August 20, 2026. ithome.com/...247
6. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4CGTN. "Humanoid robot takes on tennis, testing AI's next frontier." August 23, 2026. news.cgtn.com/...ng-AI-s-next-frontier-1PQ73bW4mSQ
7. ^1 ^2 ^3Beijing Galbot Co., Ltd. "World's First Autonomous Humanoid Tennis Match: GALBOT Robots Complete 100+ Consecutive Rallies." Company press release distributed by PR Newswire, August 23, 2026. prnewswire.com/...00-consecutive-rallies-302857808
8. ^Zhikai Zhang, Haofei Lu, Yunrui Lian, et al. "Learning Athletic Humanoid Tennis Skills from Imperfect Human Motion Data." arXiv:2603.12686, March 13, 2026. arxiv.org/...2603.12686
9. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12 ^13Galbot. "Galbot ET1" product page (specifications). Accessed October 19, 2026. galbot.com/et1
10. ^1 ^2 ^3Galbot. "The world's first native-agent robot 'Yinhe Xingzai' is now open for pre-order" (全球首个原生智能体机器人『银河星仔』火热预订中). Galbot WeChat account, September 3, 2026. mp.weixin.qq.com/...RnmqpkT5Y-DNg4QE9ga1bg
11. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Feng Hua (AI Lanmeihui). "Galbot still can't do without performance" (银河通用，还是离不开表演). TMTPost, September 2026. tmtpost.com/8129137
12. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9QbitAI. "Galbot's consumer robot goes on sale from 79,000 yuan" (银河通用消费级机器人开卖了，7.9万起售). Republished by ifeng.com, October 2, 2026. tech.ifeng.com/...8wtEwIPttlJ
13. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7Wu Qixing. "Priced from 79,000 yuan, Galbot humanoid robot opens pre-orders, over 200 in first day" (售价7.9万起 银河通用智能人形机器人开启预订 首日预订破200台). PCauto, via Tencent News, October 4, 2026. news.qq.com/...20261004A06SJW00
14. ^1 ^2 ^3Cheng Zijiao. "Humanoid robots cut prices for the exam: don't let dancing hide the commercialization questions" (人形机器人降价赶考：别让跳舞掩盖商业化考题). The Beijing News, October 9, 2026. bjnews.com.cn/...1791540370129400
15. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Li Yuan. "World Robot Conference observation: AstraBrain's vision of letting all robots share a 'brain'." GeekPark, via NetEase, August 20, 2026. 163.com/...L4PA43MQ05119FMA
16. ^Jiqizhixin. "One 'AstraBrain' for every body: Galbot's bipedal robot debuts" (一颗「星脑」所有身体用，银河通用双足机器人首秀). Via Sina Finance, August 20, 2026. t.cj.sina.com.cn/...ee3b7d6c001017kn0
17. ^Galbot. Official website home page (AstraBrain architecture). Accessed October 19, 2026. galbot.com
18. ^IT Home. "World's first fully autonomous tennis-playing robot appears, plays mixed doubles with athletes" (全球首款全自主打网球机器人亮相，与运动员开展人机混双对打). August 22, 2026. ithome.com/...107
19. ^IROS 2026. "Awards." IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Accessed October 19, 2026. 2026.ieee-iros.org/...awards
20. ^Sina Finance. "Galbot joint research wins IROS 2026 special best paper award" (银河通用联合研究成果获 IROS 2026 专项最佳论文). October 1, 2026. finance.sina.com.cn/...doc-inittekf2054690.shtml
21. ^1 ^2Qianlong.com (excerpted from Beijing Daily). "Smart China Open: technology brings new experiences to the venue" (智汇中网 科技赋能赛场新体验). Via Sina, October 2026. k.sina.cn/article_5953190046_162d6789e06703tr4a
22. ^Humanoid.guide. "Galbot ET1 Specs & Price." Accessed October 19, 2026. humanoid.guide/...galbot-et1