Is Noetix Robotics a US company?

No, it is based in Beijing (Songyan Dongli in Chinese).

What is Noetix Hobbs?

The former name of its lifelike-head robot line: Hobbs 3 is today's Xiao Nuo and Hobbs W1 is the wheeled W1.

How many DOF does the Hobbs head have?

32 active and 8 passive on the W1.

No, it drives on a wheeled base with lidar navigation.

How much does the Noetix Robotics Hobbs cost?

The manufacturer has not published a price for the Noetix Robotics Hobbs. You can send a purchase enquiry through MERA Robotics.

Is the Noetix Robotics Hobbs available to buy?

Status: In development: the manufacturer has shown the robot but is not selling it openly yet.

How do I buy the Noetix Robotics Hobbs through MERA Robotics?

Click “I want to buy” or fill in the form on this page. MERA Robotics will reply whether and on what terms the model is available and can help deploy it with the MERA OS conversation system.

Noetix Robotics Hobbs: specs, price, availability

Hobbs is the former name of the bionic robot line from Beijing-based Noetix Robotics (Songyan Dongli): robots with a lifelike silicone head driven by dozens of actuators. It covers stationary half-body models (Hobbs 1, Hobbs 3, now sold as Xiao Nuo) and the wheeled W0 and W1 with arms and hands, used for reception, showrooms, government service halls, schools and hospitals.

History and launch

Noetix showed its first lifelike-head prototype (Hobbs 1) in August 2024. Hobbs 3, now called Xiao Nuo, launched in May 2025. In August 2025 the company introduced the wheeled Hobbs W0, which added arms, dexterous hands and a mobile base to the bionic head, followed in October 2025 by Hobbs W1 (now simply W1).

Noetix's materials now mostly use Hobbs in brackets ("W1, formerly Hobbs W1", "Xiao Nuo, formerly Hobbs 3"). The line has nothing to do with a modular research platform with a swappable torso, nor with a US company.

Hardware (Hobbs W1)

Noetix's spec sheet lists the W1 at 525 x 525 x 1700 mm. Its platinum-silicone head, which the company calls waxwork-grade, has 32 active and 8 passive DOF driven by cables and linkages, with neck pitch of ±27°, roll ±25° and yaw ±35°. Two RGB cameras sit in the eyes, a third in the chest along with a linear four-microphone array.

Each 3.3 kg arm has 5 active DOF and a 2 kg payload; each dexterous hand has 6 active and 5 passive DOF, with a working envelope of a 600 mm-radius hemisphere. The base uses differential drive with a caster, lidar SLAM navigation, 360-degree obstacle avoidance, anti-drop sensors and automatic docking, reaching 1.2 m/s, 10° slopes, 30 mm gaps and 18 mm steps. The controller is an Intel J1900 with two 6-TOPS NPUs, the chest carries a 7-inch screen and the lithium-ion battery gives 6.5 hours.

Software and AI

Conversation runs through the Doubao, iFlytek or Qwen language models, with response latency under 1.2 s and expression latency under 150 ms depending on the network. The head lip-syncs to speech and reproduces micro-expressions. Noetix provides demo programs and developer documentation, and in December 2025 announced a general-purpose bionic head development platform for other robot makers.

Applications

Noetix lists corporate reception, showroom guiding, government and enterprise service counters, school research and teaching, and hospital patient guidance. It has not published deployment numbers for the Hobbs line; in July 2025 it said only that it had delivered more than 100 robots of all types.

Manufacturer

Beijing Noetix Robotics (Songyan Dongli) was founded in Beijing in September 2023, with a founding team drawn from Tsinghua and Zhejiang universities among others. It is best known for its N2 and E1 bipedal humanoids and the low-cost Bumi. In September 2025 it raised nearly 300 million yuan in a Pre-B round led by Fangguang Capital, and in November 2025 nearly 200 million yuan in a Pre-B+ round led by CICC Capital.