How much do AGV and AMR warehouse robots cost?

After the president announced this year that the issue with migrant labor would be addressed strictly and that the only solution is to increase efficiency—effectively directing a shift toward warehouse automation and production—large companies immediately understood the message.

* There will be fewer line workers.
* Labor costs will increase.
* The situation will not change.

This situation is actually beneficial for automation. How else can large companies be pushed to invest in robotics when a worker can be hired for 200 rubles per hour?

Naturally, everyone began studying the best Chinese practices. Since the field is new and not widely tested by peers, it is difficult to determine which solutions are truly reliable and which are essentially low-quality copies. There are well-known major companies such as Geek+ and Hikrobot. However, at the beginning of recent events, even large companies from friendly countries effectively said “jian” and abandoned projects in favor of euro-dollar markets. This made it even harder to understand which warehouse robots to choose and how much they should cost.

I will try to justify the cost from another perspective. As a company that develops software for automating any wheeled vehicles, we have experience designing and building our own robot—albeit a cleaning one. At the start of the project, we reviewed around seven engineering and industrial design teams capable of building a robot. The average cost of developing a first prototype was about 7 million rubles, with possible deviation up to 100%. It could be higher—and likely will be. The most expensive proposal came from Smirnov Lab—10 million rubles, and that was without the actual product, only CAD models. In the end, we managed to build a robot for 3 million rubles without makeshift solutions or critical errors, which speaks to the professionalism of our team. And this was not just an AGV-style chassis—it was a full cleaning robot with four motors (two for drive, two for brushes), washing systems (tanks, pumps, vacuum motor), actuators, and multiple service components. The production cost came out to around 1 million rubles.

Based on this, I can say that any warehouse AGV or AMR produced at scale in China should cost between 200,000 and 500,000 rubles. So when I see Russian Ronavi robots priced at 2.2 million rubles, I am somewhat surprised.

It is important to understand a key point: China has developed a proper collaboration model. There are very few companies that specialize in autonomous driving software, while many manufacturers produce hardware but rely on software from those few leaders. Until 2021, most robots used controllers (as they call autonomy units) from a Dutch company, costing over 1 million rubles. Naturally, adding production cost, margin, and controller resulted in prices above 2 million rubles. Then Seer appeared—a company founded by robotics competition-winning students. With financial backing, they released their own controller, selling it domestically for about 300,000 rubles. They did not crash the market but lowered prices while maintaining strong margins.

I learned about them in the summer, even hosted their Russia representative at a restaurant, and realized their strategy is identical to ours: building a driver platform. They gathered a pool of hardware manufacturers in China, integrated with them, and now showcase a wide range of third-party robots equipped with their controller under their own brand.

They are actively entering the Russian market but, in the absence of competition, sell stackers for around 3 million rubles without delivery or VAT. They follow the same strategy as Chinese car manufacturers: sell high—Russians will buy anyway. Local resellers offer them for about 4 million rubles. Meanwhile, we supply similar hardware with our software for 2.6 million rubles. And our clients are not dependent on Chinese support—we fully own the product.

The fair market prices, which already exist or will emerge once the market stabilizes:

* AGV warehouse robot — 1.3 million rubles
- AMR warehouse robot — 1.6 million rubles
- FMR pallet transporter — 2.6 million rubles
* FMR stacker robot — 3.2 million rubles