Most robot price comparisons run brand against brand. This one runs the same brand against itself, on two continents, on the same day.
Two manufacturers — Trossen Robotics and Unitree — operate their own US web stores with checkout prices. Both are also carried by Génération Robots, a distributor in Mérignac, France, that publishes prices both inclusive and exclusive of VAT. That gives eleven products where the *model name matches exactly* and both numbers can be read on 3 August 2026.
Method, stated up front so you can argue with it: French VAT of 20% is removed from every European figure, and one exchange rate is applied throughout — the ECB reference rate of 1 EUR = 1.1485 USD. Neither tax nor currency movement is doing any work in the numbers below.
The eleven pairs
| Model | Maker's US store | Distributor, ex-VAT | ≈ USD | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unitree Go2 Pro (w/ controller) | $3,050 | €3,165.83 | $3,635.96 | **+19.2%** |
| Unitree H1 | $90,000 (contact) | from €93,496.00 | $107,380.16 | +19.3% |
| DEEP Robotics X30 Pro | $99,000 * | from €95,000.00 | $109,107.50 | +10.2% |
| Unitree Go2 Air (w/ controller) | $1,850 | €2,332.50 | $2,678.87 | +44.8% |
| Unitree Go2 X (w/ controller) | $4,500 | €6,000.00 | $6,891.00 | +53.1% |
| Unitree R1 EDU | $10,500 | from €15,000.00 | $17,227.50 | +64.1% |
| Unitree H2 | $29,900 | from €45,000.00 | $51,682.50 | +72.9% |
| Trossen Stationary AI | $15,995 | from €25,000.00 | $28,712.50 | +79.5% |
| Trossen Solo AI | $7,995 | from €13,000.00 | $14,930.50 | +86.8% |
| Trossen WidowX AI | $2,995 | €4,900.00 | $5,627.65 | **+87.9%** |
| Trossen Mobile AI | $22,995 | from €38,500.00 | $44,217.25 | +92.3% |
\* DEEP Robotics does not run a US store; the $99,000 figure is a US dealer listing from our 29 July check and was not re-verified today. Every other US figure was read at the maker's own checkout on 3 August.
Median premium: +64.1%. Range: +10.2% to +92.3%.
The spread is the finding, not the median
A single distributor markup would show up as a roughly constant percentage. It does not. The eleven pairs fall into two clusters that behave differently.
Trossen's four platforms sit in a tight band of +79.5% to +92.3% — four products, a 12.8-point spread, which looks like a policy applied to a line.
Unitree's quadrupeds scatter from +19.2% to +53.1%, and the pattern inside that scatter is legible: the cheapest premium is on the Go2 Pro, Unitree's highest-volume consumer quadruped and the one a European buyer can most easily price-check elsewhere. The Go2 X, newer and thinner on the ground, carries +53.1%. The H2 humanoid carries +72.9%.
Our reading: the premium tracks how easy the SKU is to shop, not how expensive it is to ship. That is a claim about competitive pressure, and it is ours, not the distributor's.
What the gap plausibly buys is real: import duty (the euro figures are ex-VAT, not ex-duty), freight on machines that ship as crated industrial goods, local warranty and returns handling, EU-facing documentation, integration engineering, and currency risk taken by the distributor rather than the buyer. None of that is free. Whether it is worth 80% on a $2,995 arm is a question a European lab has to answer with a service expectation, not a spreadsheet.
Two things the tables hide
"From" is not a price. Six of the eleven European figures are "from" prices with no stated configuration. If the base European configuration is richer than the US one, the true gap is smaller than the table shows; if it is the same, the table is right. The distributor does not say.
How much that matters is visible in one line of its own catalog: the Kinova Gen3 Lite and the Kinova Gen3 are both listed at "from €18,720.00 incl. tax." Those are structurally different arms — six axes and roughly 0.5 kg payload against seven axes and roughly 4 kg. A single figure covering both is a catalog artifact, not a quotation, and we excluded Kinova from the table for that reason.
Sometimes the price disappears entirely. Unitree's Z1 Pro arm has an add-to-cart price of $15,999 on the maker's US store. At the European distributor the same product reads "Price upon request." The transatlantic difference there is not a number at all — it is the difference between a price and a phone call, which is the pattern we took apart in why cobot prices are hidden.
A placeholder problem on the US side too
This is not a story about European distributors being sloppier. Unitree's own US store lists seven products across eleven variants at exactly $100,000.00 — the A2, B2, B2-W, B1, As2 (Air, Pro and EDU), H2 Plus and three R1-D variants. These are machines with nothing in common except that Unitree has not set a retail price for them; its own homepage says of the B2, "You can contact us directly to obtain price."
That is the same failure mode we catalogued on 2 August — four different KEENON machines at one $20,580.00 price, a German Bionic exoskeleton at $0.01, teach pendants at $0.00 — with a new variant: a round number large enough to look deliberate. $100,000.00 is a contact form wearing a price tag, and it will be scraped as a quotation.
What to do with this
If you are buying in Europe, get the configuration behind every "from" price in writing before you compare anything, and ask explicitly what the distributor is providing that the factory store is not — warranty term, who holds spares, who does the commissioning. That is what you are paying the premium for, and it is worth having named.
If you are buying in the US, the corollary is less comfortable: the factory-store price is close to the floor of what this equipment can be sold for, and there is not much negotiating room hiding in it.
And whichever side you are on, treat a round number on a store page as unverified until something on the page can be added to a cart. See our Trossen price guide for the same exercise run in depth on one maker.
Sources
- Trossen Robotics store — WidowX AI, Solo AI, Stationary AI, Mobile AI listings, read 3 August 2026
- Trossen AI product page — advertised platform prices, read 3 August 2026
- Unitree official store — Go2, R1, G1, H1, H2, Z1 Pro listings and currency, read 3 August 2026
- Génération Robots — Trossen Robotics arms
- Génération Robots — Unitree quadrupeds and Unitree humanoids
- Génération Robots — DEEP Robotics and Kinova
- Frankfurter / ECB reference rate — EUR/USD 1.1485
