Mantis Standard Starts at 9,800 Yuan and Snaps Together Like a PC
Blue Insect Embodied, a Xi’an Jiaotong University technology-transfer company, launched Mantis Standard (“Xiaobai”) on September 14. The starting price is 9,800 yuan. TechNode and IT Home both carry that figure. 36Kr’s English edition translates the company as BlueBot Embodied Intelligence; the Chinese name is 蓝虫具身.
This is a wheeled upper-body platform, not a biped. Chassis, arms, waist, and head are separate modules joined with quick-install mechanical and electrical interfaces. 36Kr’s pitch is blunt: buy the arm for a desktop experiment, add the base when you need it to roll.
The spec sheet
IT Home and TechNode list the same hardware numbers:
- Height: 1.4 m
- Degrees of freedom: 22 whole-body; 36Kr adds 7 DoF per arm
- Single-arm payload: 7 kg
- Arm span: 663 mm
- Teleop latency: under 10 ms
- Waist lift: 550 mm, lift speed 200 mm/s
- Base: 3-DoF omnidirectional, 3 m/s forward
- Runtime: 3 hours
36Kr also lists 4K 60 fps binocular vision, optional wrist cameras, and a 3-axis gimbal head. Control sits on the company’s BW-Brain running a “Wormhole” model family, with a “Quantum” VR teleop stack for teaching and data capture.
The company says the robot plugs into mainstream embodied-development stacks and ships with tools, tutorials, and project support. 36Kr notes an earlier Mantis Pro took bronze in mixed-material sorting at the World Humanoid Robot Games in August 2025. Standard is the cheaper, modular follow-on aimed at labs and light application work.
A Human’s Take
Nine thousand eight hundred yuan for a dual-arm mobile manipulator is the number that made me stop. It is a research cart with a lift column, not a factory biped, and that is fine. If the quick-swap interfaces actually let a lab keep the same arm when they add a base, this is the PC-builder model the humanoid aisle has been missing. I want a teardown of that 7 kg wrist before I trust the price.