Unitree Cuts Its Dexterous-Hand Price to $6,500 With the Dex5-S
Unitree announced the Dex5-S on September 21, a five-finger dexterous hand built at roughly 1:1 human scale with 22 degrees of freedom — every joint motor-driven, backdrivable and fitted with impact-torque protection. The company’s own listing prices it from RMB 39,900 per hand, about $6,500 before tax and shipping; a bimanual pair starts near $13,000 before controllers, mounts and integration.
That’s a steep drop from where Unitree’s dexterous-hand pricing sat a year ago. Its predecessor, the 20-DoF Dex5-1, still lists with US resellers at roughly $24,000–29,000 per hand. The Dex5-S adds two more degrees of freedom (including a little-finger roll axis the older hand lacked) at well under a third of that price — though Unitree’s launch notes are thin on continuous torque, fingertip force and tactile-sensing specs, and no ROS or SDK packaging has shipped yet. Payload is quoted at a peak 2kg per hand, dropping to about 1kg for sustained work.
Worth separating from the headline number: this is a manipulation peripheral, not a robot in its own right. It bolts onto a humanoid arm — Unitree’s own G1 and H2 chassis are the obvious targets — rather than shipping as a standalone product a buyer can put to work. And as of this writing, Unitree’s own store has no dedicated Dex5-S product page; the price comes from the company’s announcement, not yet a live checkout. For labs and integrators who were quoting five-figure sums per hand to add manipulation to a research platform, a $6,500 starting price — even before it clears Unitree’s own storefront — resets what “developer-grade dexterous hand” is supposed to cost.
Sources
Primary sources referenced in this article. Prices in the tables come from the live index and carry their own as-of dates.