Humanoid robots are being trialed in car manufacturing.Credit: VCG/Getty
Humanoid robots are on the brink of being commercially useful, say Chinese and US firms that have announced plans to produce them at scale in the past three months.
Many researchers agree that there has been a step change in humanoid capability over the past five years, owing to cheaper parts as well as innovations such as improved battery power and artificial-intelligence algorithms, which allow for better perception and autonomy.
In November, Chinese firm UBTECH announced that it had made “the world’s first mass delivery of humanoid robots”. More than 1,000 of its Walker S2 model humanoids were sent to factories in 2025, says Yu Zheng, a roboticist and vice-dean of the UBTECH Research Institute in Shenzhen. The silver-white humanoid can walk autonomously and stably, as well as grab and move objects, but deployment “is still at an early stage”, says Zheng.
Whether humanoids are saving companies time or money remains to be seen. Battery time is limited to hours and many activities still require human operators, who use the robots as puppets to complete tasks while gathering data for future iterations. Other researchers caution that technical and safety limitations mean that humanoids are far from ready for general-purpose use in homes and offices.
“They can do maybe one or two things autonomously, or semi-autonomously,” says Esyin Chew, a roboticist at Cardiff Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, who is overseeing a project involving trialling more than 80 robots in service and health-care settings. “But they cannot react to real-world problems like our human brains,” she says.
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Why, robot?
Science fiction has long fuelled the idea that robots will ultimately come in human form, despite the body type being inherently complex and unstable compared with the static or quadruped robots already used in industry, says Oskar Palinko, a roboticist at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. “A humanoid will fall over if it loses power,” he says.
But humanoids have the advantage of functioning in environments people have created. This in theory could make a humanoid a “universal tool” that could do the job of multiple other types of machines, says Palinko.
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