Unitree's whole deployment line has no legs — all three D-series humanoids stand on a column

Unitree lists five humanoids under "Application Plan" on its own site, and three of them carry a D suffix. Not one of the three walks. G1-D, the newest, is a G1 torso on a telescopic column that travels between roughly 1,260 and 1,680 mm. Unitree counts 19 degrees of freedom outside the end effector — seven per arm, two in the waist, one in the column, two in the base — and offers the base as a choice between a passive castor stand and a powered chassis capped at 1.5 m/s. H2-D does the same thing one size up: no legs, a lifting column with 0.5 m of travel, 135 kg, 7 kg rated payload per arm. R1-D goes furthest and drops the base as well — a torso, a head and two arms bolted to a flat mounting plate, from 4,290 USD in Unitree's own shop. The reason is written into the product rather than announced. G1-D is not sold as a robot at all but as an end-to-end platform, in which the machine is one of three components; the other two are a data-acquisition console built for hundreds of robots collecting simultaneously and a training stack that exports a policy back to the machine in one click, with declared support for the open pi and GR00T families and Unitree's own UnifoLM-WMA-0. For that job legs are a liability: they add cost, they add a balance problem, and a demonstration recorded from a swaying torso is a worse training example than one recorded from a rigid column. The height range does the work that legs would otherwise do, letting the same arms reach a low bench and a high shelf. It is a quiet admission about where humanoid value sits in 2026. The walking machines — G1, H2, R1 — remain the showpieces, and Unitree has spent the summer demonstrating boxing and ping-pong with them in Beijing. The versions the company positions for actual deployment and data work are the ones that gave up the feature the whole category is named for. One caveat on availability: Unitree publishes a price for exactly one of the three, the entry R1-D configuration. G1-D and H2-D are quote-on-request, and none of the three carries a published mass or payload figure on the G1-D page. In the United States, the FCC Covered List entry of 28 July 2026 blocks new equipment authorisations for the manufacturer, which affects new models rather than machines already authorised.