Usually, I start off these annual highlights posts by saying that it was the best year ever for robotics. But this year, I’m not so sure. At the end of 2024, it really seemed like AI and humanoid robots were poised to make a transformative amount of progress towards some sort of practicality. While it’s certainly true that progress has been made, it’s hard to rationalize what’s actually happened in 2025 with the amount of money and hype that has suffused robotics over the course of the year. And for better or worse, humanoids are overshadowing everything else, raising questions about what will happen if the companies building them ultimately do not succeed.
We’ll be going into 2026 with both optimism and skepticism, and we’ll keep doing what we always do: talking to the experts, asking as many hard questions as we can, and making sure to share all the cool robots, even (or especially) the ones that you won’t see anywhere else.
So thanks for reading, and to all you awesome robotics folks out there, thanks for sharing your work with us! IEEE Spectrum has a bunch of exciting new stuff planned for 2026, and as we close out 2025, here’s a quick look back at some of our best robotics stories of the year.
Eddie Guy
Humanoid robots are hard, and they’re hard in lots of different ways. For some of those ways, we at least understand the problems and what the solutions will likely involve. But there are other problems that have no clear solutions, and most humanoid companies, especially the well-funded ones, seem quite happy to wave those problems away while continuing to raise extraordinary amounts of money. We’re going to keep calling this out whenever we see it, and expect even more skepticism in 2026.
CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images
Security is one of those pesky little things that is super important in robotics but that early-stage robotics companies typically treat as an afterthought because it doesn’t drive investment. Chinese manufacturer Unitree is really the one company with humanoids robots that are available enough and affordable enough for clever people to perform a security audit on them. And to the surprise of no one, Unitree’s robots had serious vulnerabilities, which as of yet have not all been fixed.
Amazon
The thing I appreciate about the folks at Amazon Robotics is how relentless they are in finding creative solutions for problems at scale. Amazon simply doesn’t have time to mess around, and they’re designing robots to do what robots do best: specific repetitive tasks in structured environments. In the current climate of robotics hype, it’s refreshing, honestly.
Boston Dynamics
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