$100,000 Unitree robot became an all-terrain wheelchair

A YouTube creator, Jake Laser, has turned a Unitree B2-W robot dog into an all-terrain wheelchair for his father, who has multiple sclerosis. The result is not a flashy demo piece but a working prototype: it can roll across flat floors, walk up stairs, and reach places where a conventional wheelchair would get stuck. The catch is the price. The robot dog alone costs $100,000.

The project is built on the commercial Unitree B2-W, a robot with wheels on its legs and a payload capacity of up to 120 kilograms. That matters here: the machine has to carry a person while maintaining balance as the terrain changes and the rider shifts position.

According to the source, Laser said the chair would not have worked without software modifications. With a passenger on its back, the robot initially lost balance, and during testing it tipped over several times. For a home-built system that is unnerving, but for a prototype it is fairly typical.

On tests, the machine handled the environments it was designed for, including stairs, rocks, and shallow water crossings. That pushes the project beyond a YouTube curiosity and into a more serious attempt to adapt commercial robotics for a mobility problem that wheelchairs have long tried to solve.

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The idea was partly prompted by Unitree itself. In one of its videos, the company showed the robot carrying a person on its back, effectively suggesting this kind of modification. Similar concepts are also showing up at larger companies: Toyota presented a robotic chair concept with four legs instead of wheels at the Japan Mobility Show 2025.

Laser’s version is still rough around the edges, but it is a functioning machine rather than a show-floor concept.