Story
Pudu is not a humanoid-native startup. It is a service-robotics company known for restaurant, hospitality, cleaning, and delivery robots, which makes D9 interesting even before the humanoid itself has a long public deployment record.
The D9 page is unusually specific for a new entrant: 170 cm height, 65 kg mass, 42 total degrees of freedom, 20 kg maximum payload in a test environment, 2 m/s maximum walking speed, tactile sensing, RGB/RGBD/IMU sensors, 275 TOPS compute, and a 0.72 kWh battery. Those details earn transparency credit.
Pudu is also building a broader embodied-AI stack around the humanoid push. Its PuduFM 1.0 and PuduAgent announcements are relevant portfolio context, and the newer D7 semi-humanoid helps separate D9 as the full-size bipedal profile. None of those announcements should be treated as proof that D9 has shipped, operates autonomously in customer deployments, or meets independent reliability benchmarks.
The caution is right on Pudu's own page. The company says some example promotional features are not yet available to customers and shipped versions may differ. That is exactly the kind of disclosure HumanoidRoster should preserve: promising hardware, real specs, but not yet verified as a deployed commercial humanoid fleet.
Reality check
Pudu publishes unusually detailed D9 specs, including size, mass, DoF, torque, payload, speed, sensors, compute, and battery. The score stays conservative because Pudu's own page warns that some promotional features may not yet be available to customers and shipped versions may differ from promotional content.
- Pudu calls D9 its first full-sized bipedal humanoid robot
- Pudu lists D9 at 170 cm, 65 kg, 42 total DoF, 352 N·m maximum joint torque, 20 kg maximum payload in a test environment, and 2 m/s maximum walking speed
- Pudu lists RGB, RGBD, tactile sensors, IMU, 275 TOPS compute, and a 15Ah / 0.72 kWh battery
- Pudu says the D9 uses PUDU DH11 dexterous hands with active and passive DoF plus tactile sensing
- Pudu introduced PuduFM 1.0 as an embodied-intelligence foundation model for general physical agents, positioned around spatial understanding, physical reasoning, and future-state prediction across Pudu's embodied-AI portfolio
- Pudu's own product note says some example features in promotional materials are not yet available to customers and shipped versions may differ
- Pudu's PuduFM and PuduAgent announcements are company AI-platform positioning, not evidence that D9 has shipped, operates autonomously in customer deployments, or has independently verified task reliability
- Pudu's maturity as a service-robotics company is not the same as verified D9 humanoid deployment maturity
- Payload and speed values are official specifications, not independent field-performance measurements
