The Bumi humanoid robot: sub-$1,500, tracked

The Bumi humanoid robot is real, it ships, and you cannot buy one here. Set the toy aisle aside and the cheapest thing built and sold as a humanoid robot is a child-sized Chinese biped called Bumi (小布米), from Beijing's Noetix Robotics, which trades at home as 松延动力, Songyan Dynamics. It lists at 9,998 yuan, about $1,400. Presales opened on JD.com on October 23, 2025. It was the first robot on stage at February's CCTV Spring Festival Gala. It got a firmware update in July 2026. All of that happened inside China, and none of it happened in a US store.

Yuan figures are Chinese domestic list prices; dollar figures are the conversions printed in the coverage cited, not a rate I am quoting today.

Bumi status box

• Orderable: in China, via JD.com and Noetix's sales team. Outside China, no. I found no Western retailer or distributor listing it at any price.
• Price: 9,998 yuan for the base model, still the figure in China Daily's June 12, 2026 survey of the sub-10,000-yuan tier, converted across coverage as $1,370 to $1,408. Noetix's own product page prints no price at all, just a "Contact Consultant" button.
• What it is: a 21 degree of freedom walking and dancing companion for families, classrooms and hobby programmers.
• Autonomy: it stands, walks, poses, dances, and runs routines you record or program. It does not manipulate objects.
• US channel: none, and since July 28, 2026 a new one would need an FCC equipment authorization the agency has stopped granting to foreign humanoids.

Which 9,998 you are looking at

That number is the base machine, pitched as a limited-time presale price when the JD listing went up. Noetix bills Bumi as the first high-performance humanoid at the ten-thousand-yuan level, which is marketing, and also why the figure stuck.

Above it sits a variant ladder. The trade outlet Embodied Global, writing on July 6, 2026 off Chinese-language reports, puts Bumi Lite at 9,998 yuan, Bumi Pro at 14,998, and EDU-Pro at 39,900. Noetix publishes none of those, so treat the upper rungs as reported rather than confirmed. The maker does confirm the ladder exists: Pro, EDU-Pro and EDU-Max sit side by side, differing mainly in whether an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super or an Orin NX rides on the base compute.

What the spec sheet actually promises

Two spec sets are in circulation and they do not match. Launch coverage described a 94 cm, 12 kg robot. Noetix's current page describes something slightly bigger.

Spec	Launch coverage (October 2025)	Noetix spec page (August 2026)
Height	94 cm	98 cm standing (98 x 35 x 20 cm)
Weight	12 kg	about 17 kg, labelled gross weight
Degrees of freedom	not specified	21: six per leg, four per arm, one at the waist
Hands	not specified	poseable hand, no actuated fingers listed
Battery	not specified	48 V quick-swap, 2 to 3 hours
Compute	Rockchip	6 TOPS base; Jetson Orin Nano Super or Orin NX on EDU models
Sensing	not specified	camera, IMU, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth

Launch column from Interesting Engineering and Engadget, both late October 2025. Treat the 17 kg carefully, because gross weight usually means the box, not the robot.

Now add up the joints. Six per leg is twelve. Four per arm is eight. One waist joint makes 21, and 21 is the published total. Nothing is left for fingers and nothing is left for a neck. The hands pose; they do not close on anything. A robot with no actuated fingers will not hand you a glass of water at any price, and Bumi's is the price that makes people ask.

What it does

It performs. Noetix's English page leads with a line worth reading twice: Bumi "automatically stands up upon startup, no need to hold or adjust, always ready to accompany you on stage." The stage is not a metaphor. This robot's public career so far is a comedy sketch, a UN side event in Bangkok, and a lot of dancing.

A July 15, 2026 firmware release added a teaching mode that records poses one at a time, a dance mode and a walking mode, plus an app called NOETIX Run, per that same Embodied Global report. Visual programming is listed on every variant. For a school buying twenty, that combination is the product. For a household it is a capable toy with a real bipedal gait, and the RC and toy humanoid tier below it starts an order of magnitude cheaper.

Noetix walks a new owner through Bumi's first day at home: a gentle wave, an exciting dance, an unexpected surprise, and signature moves you create yourself. (@TheRealNoetix, 2026-08-05)

The dated record

Date	What happened
2025-10-23	Presale opens on JD.com at 9,998 yuan, billed as limited-time
First 3 hours, first 2 days	More than 200 units, then 500, per SCMP
2025-12-15	Noetix announces a 1,000-unit order from Huicheng Co., Ltd. at 9,998 yuan a unit
2026-02-16	Bumi is the first robot on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, in a grandmother-and-grandson sketch
2026-02-18	Consumer delivery slips from March 1 to late April after the gala demand spike
2026-07-15	OTA firmware adds teaching, dance and walking modes plus the NOETIX Run app

The gala matters more than the funding rounds. SCMP reported on February 18, 2026 that thousands of Bumis went into JD.com carts after the broadcast and that Noetix pushed delivery from March 1 to late April. A product that slips its ship date because too many people bought it is further along than most humanoid announcements get. The 1,000-unit order signed in December, though, went to a company, not to households.

What a US buyer runs into

Three walls, in order of height.

There is no channel. Noetix runs an English site, and the purchase route on it is a Beijing customer service line and a contact form for purchase and cooperation.

There is now a rule. 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. Already-authorized models keep selling and units already bought are untouched. Bumi has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so it is precisely the class of device that needs an authorization to be marketed here. Whether Noetix holds one I could not confirm: the FCC ID lookup sites refused my automated queries, so read that as unverified rather than as a no. What the ruling did to the rest of the buyable list is in the Chinese humanoid consumer map.

And there is the arithmetic that kills grey imports. Shipping alone on a China-direct Unitree G1 runs $300 to $1,200, before buyer-paid customs. On a $1,400 machine that is most of a second robot.

Whether a $1,400 humanoid is sustainable

Probably not at this margin, and the company has said so. In SCMP's November 1, 2025 piece on the low-cost humanoid race, founder Jiang Zheyuan acknowledged that Bumi's margins are very low. The same report put capacity at more than 200 units a month in Beijing, a Changzhou plant expected to add 300 and a third site planned at 500, funded by a pre-B round of nearly 300 million yuan (about $42.3 million). A Series B followed on February 17, 2026; Noetix's own English headline gives a figure with no currency attached, so I am not printing one.

The price got there through vertical integration, composite parts and domestic sourcing. That works, and it also means the number can move either way once a funding round stops carrying it.

Where it lands on the ladder

Against export prices Bumi is under a third of the cheapest biped you can actually order in the West, the Unitree R1 at $4,900. The gap narrows at home, where China Daily lists that same R1 at 26,900 yuan, putting Bumi at 37 percent of it rather than 29. Either way it is the floor of this category, and the floor is a machine with no hands worth the name.

What I am watching: a Western distributor, an FCC grant, a price move off 9,998, and a second-generation Bumi with actuated fingers. None of the four has happened, so from a US address Bumi stays a machine to read about rather than one to order. If you want a biped you can actually pay for from here, the cheapest humanoids you can actually order is the shortlist, and the full price ladder shows what every rung above $1,400 buys you.