The high cost components of a robot like this are: Actuators, motor drivers, batteries, compute, sensors, and mechanical components.

I did not reference SPOTs specs but it must be full of low volume custom parts (expensive). They are honestly probably selling them at little to no profit as $70k is about how much a low volume custom research robot might cost in parts. But I could see them getting SPOT down to $20k in parts, but then you still need to do assembly which is going to be very hands on with technicians doing assembly and test engineers checking components. And one could imagine they'd like it if they could manage some profit. IDK it all adds up robots are super expensive.

1- Unitrees robot looks identical - though it looks like it lacks Lidar?

2- Is the Unitree robot so similar because of talent poaching or just a coincidence?

3-How could a person invest in a company like unitree?

Thanks

The more expensive versions of the Go1 have Lidar.

Robot dogs are going to look like dogs - a body with legs. According to the about page, the CEO has been developing quadruped robots since 2013 (his masters thesis). https://www.unitree.com/aboutus

Looks like they've take venture capital money: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unitree-robotics