IFR: South Korea has the most factory robots per worker; the US is 8th
Added Official record
The International Federation of Robotics counts 1,066 industrial robots per 10,000 factory employees in South Korea, 873 in Singapore and 469 in Germany. The US is 8th with 323 and China 19th with 193. The new global average is 152.
Why it matters A yearly, neutral measure of how automated factories already are.
Google DeepMind rolls out Gemini Robotics 2.5 to its robot partners
Added The company's own figures
Google DeepMind calls Gemini Robotics 2.5 its most capable vision-language-action model to date and reports a 30% to 100% higher success rate, depending on the task type, across over 200 tasks. Apptronik's Apollo 2 reached 96% success kitting car parts in a Mercedes-Benz pilot.
Why it matters Only partner companies get the model, and the results are Google's own tests, but it ties a large AI lab's model to work on car production lines.
Google DeepMind releases ASIMOV-Jailbreak, an open test of robot jailbreak resistance
Added The company's own figures
With Gemini Robotics 2.5, Google DeepMind released ASIMOV-Jailbreak as an open-source benchmark. It says its Argon model reaches 99.5% jailbreak resistance on it, against 82% for its previous baseline.
Why it matters Robot makers get a shared, open test of whether a robot can be talked into unsafe actions. The scores are Google's own.
NVIDIA unveils its GR00T 2 robot model at CoRL; code is due in December
Added The company's own figures
At CoRL in Austin, NVIDIA introduced GR00T 2, an open world action model trained partly on 100,000 hours of first-person recordings of people. In NVIDIA's tests it averaged 71% success on 50 tasks with one demonstration each, and 95% with five. Its research page says the code comes in December.
Why it matters NVIDIA calls GR00T 2 open, but its code is due only in December, and its research page gives no date for the model's weights.
Boston Dynamics puts Atlas on wheels to test the limits of its motors
Added The company's own figures
Boston Dynamics fitted Atlas with wheels in place of its feet to push its actuators to their limits, its own blog says; Unite.AI and Korea JoongAng Daily reported it. The company calls the wheeled Atlas a research testbed, not a product.
Why it matters A look at how Atlas's maker stress-tests its hardware. The walking Atlas is the one in training at Hyundai's Metaplant America.
Six AgiBot humanoids run a Shanghai store for 24 hours; two fail the final check
Added The company's own figuresAutonomy: not stated
AgiBot put six G2 wheeled humanoids in a working convenience store in Shanghai's Xuhui District from 10 a.m. on 2 November to 10 a.m. on 3 November. Together they did 1,730 tasks; four passed the final assessment and two did not.
Why it matters A public, timed test of humanoids doing shop work round the clock, failures included. AgiBot ran and scored it, and does not say how much of the work was autonomous.
NEURA, E.ON and enviaM team up to train robots for power-grid work
Added The company's own figuresAutonomy: not stated
NEURA Robotics, E.ON and enviaM are partnering to develop robots for energy infrastructure, trained at the TUM RoboGym at Munich Airport, with humanoids such as NEURA's 4NE1. enviaM's chief executive expects initial practical experience during 2027.
Why it matters An energy group is trying robots for grid work, and names 2027 for its first practical experience with them.
Hugging Face releases version 0.7.0 of its LeRobot robot-learning library
Added The company's own figures
Hugging Face tagged version 0.7.0 of LeRobot on GitHub on 5 November. Its release notes say the version rebuilds installation, training, inference and the hardware layer.
Why it matters An update to a public code library for training robots, which anyone can download from GitHub.
Agility Robotics, maker of Digit, starts trading on Nasdaq as AGLT
Added The company's own figures
Agility began trading on Nasdaq on 5 November and calls itself the first US publicly listed pure-play humanoid robotics company. It says the deal brought about $465 million in gross capital and that it holds more than $300 million in committed multi-year orders for Digit 5.
Why it matters Investors can now buy shares in a humanoid maker whose Digit robots already work for GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.
AgiBot unveils its GO-3 Preview robot model and promises an open release
Added The company's own figures
AgiBot says its GO-3 Preview model ranks first on three embodied AI benchmarks: RoboDojo, RoboTwin and RoboColiseum. It says the model will be fully open-sourced by the end of 2026.
Why it matters If the release comes, developers get another openly available robot model, from the company Counterpoint ranked top humanoid shipper in the first half of 2026.
AgiBot says its 20,000th robot is built and proposes a measure of useful work
Added The company's own figures
At its Innovation Day in Shanghai, AgiBot said its 20,000th robot rolled off the line in September 2026. It proposed Worken: active robots times autonomous working hours times an output efficiency ratio. It showed the G2 Max, with 21 degrees of freedom and a 40 kg dual-arm capacity.
Why it matters Counting robots shipped says little about the work they do. AgiBot's measure tries to count the work instead; the 20,000 is its count of all its robots.
US orders trade talks, not tariffs, on imported robots and humanoids
Added Official record
A presidential proclamation of 28 October 2026 on imports of robotics and industrial machinery orders negotiations with trading partners, with an update due within 180 days. Its examples of advanced robots include humanoid and quadruped robots. It names tariffs as an option for later.
Why it matters The White House says the US makes less robotics and industrial equipment than it uses; tariffs on robots and parts stay possible.
GXO to put Agility's Digit humanoids in two more US warehouses from early 2027
Added The company's own figuresAutonomy: not stated
GXO will use Digit for e-commerce fulfilment at its Statesville and Lebanon sites in North Carolina and Tennessee, with deployments expected to begin in early 2027. Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes at GXO's Flowery Branch facility in Georgia.
Why it matters A paying customer is adding sites, starting on Digit 4 and moving to Digit 5 when it is commercially available.
NEURA launches its 4NE1 Gen 4 humanoid at a new robot gym in Munich
Added The company's own figures
NEURA Robotics launched 4NE1 Gen 4 at the opening of the TUM RoboGym in Munich. It says the robot is 20 percent lighter than the previous generation, has a black textile outer skin and is designed for serial production. It gave no price or delivery date.
Why it matters A German humanoid maker is preparing its robot for series production; its launch release gives no specs or price.
Agility sets Digit 5 early access for the first half of 2027
Added The company's own figures
Agility says Digit 5's onboard compute will standardise on NVIDIA IGX Thor modules and that it is adding NVIDIA Halos models to its human-detection safety system. Early access is expected in the first half of 2027, and general availability by the end of 2027.
Why it matters It dates the next commercial humanoid for warehouses and factories. Both dates are the company's own targets.
Tesla says Optimus production has begun on its Fremont lines
Added The company's own figures
Tesla's Q3 2026 shareholder update says Optimus production began on its high-volume lines in Fremont, California, and calls these its first production-quality bots. It lists the California line as "Early Ramp" and the Texas line as "Construction". Elon Musk called the ramp "somewhat bumpy".
Why it matters Tesla's humanoid moves from prototypes to a production line. The update names no price and no outside customer.
Xpeng targets late 2026 for mass production of its IRON humanoid
Added The company's own figures
Speaking in Paris on 13 October, Xpeng said mass production of its IRON humanoid is targeted for late 2026, with deliveries beginning in the first half of 2027 and a European rollout planned for the second half of 2027.
Why it matters A carmaker has put dates on its humanoid. Each is a company target, tracked in What to watch.
Agility picks Nyobolt fast-charging batteries for Digit 5
Added The company's own figures
Agility says Digit 5's new battery system gives 90 minutes of runtime and charges in 9 minutes, so the robot can do more than 20 hours of productive work in a 24-hour day. Early access with the new batteries is expected in the first half of 2027.
Why it matters Limited battery life holds humanoids back. This is a target for 2027, not a measured result.
Google offers Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics on the paid Gemini API
Added The company's own figures
Google made Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics available on the paid tier of the Gemini API in AI Studio and to Google AI Ultra subscribers. Google says it marks a step change in physical understanding, code generation and visual-semantic reasoning.
Why it matters Robot builders can use a large lab's robotics model through a paid API, without joining a partner programme.
A humanoid robot malfunctions and knocks a streamer down during a live stream
Added Reported by OECD AI Incidents Monitor
During a live stream in Colombia, a €90,000 humanoid robot malfunctioned, struck the streamer and caused him to fall, the OECD AI Incidents Monitor records, citing MARCA, AS and El Colombiano. The robot's maker is not named.
Why it matters Humanoids used for entertainment work close to people, so a malfunction can hurt someone.
Boston Dynamics names Amazon's former Alexa and AGI head scientist as CEO
Added The company's own figures
Boston Dynamics appointed Rohit Prasad as chief executive, effective 7 October 2026. Prasad was Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa and Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon.
Why it matters The maker of Atlas is now led by an AI scientist as it trains its humanoid for factory work.
Agility and FORT Robotics sign a partnership on humanoid safety
Added The company's own figures
Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics signed a memorandum of understanding on safety infrastructure for Digit 5. It builds on their earlier work: a safety pendant with emergency-stop and enabling-device functions, on-robot communications, and off-robot interfaces that connect Digit with external safety systems.
Why it matters A humanoid working near people needs ways for workers and a site's systems to stop it, not only safety built into the robot.
IFR counts about 7,000 full-size humanoids sold worldwide in 2025
Added Official record
The International Federation of Robotics says about 7,000 full-size humanoids, above 140 cm, were sold globally in 2025. Shipments of professional service robots of all kinds rose 24% to almost 250,000 units.
Why it matters A neutral yearly count to set against company figures and analyst forecasts.
Figure melts down most of its F.02 fleet as its F.03 fleet grows
Added The company's own figures
Figure says maintaining its F.02 robots no longer makes sense as its F.03 fleet grows. To protect its proprietary hardware, it melted most of the fleet in an electric arc furnace at a foundry in Imatra, Finland.
Why it matters A humanoid maker retires its previous model instead of keeping it running, and chose scrapping to keep its hardware designs to itself.
Dyna Robotics shows an uncut hour-long laundry job and explains why long tasks fail
Added The company's own figures
Dyna Robotics posted an uncut one-hour laundry-room workflow that it says Dyna-2.1 ran autonomously. Its arithmetic: a laundry cycle chains about 79 steps, and at 95% success per step the whole cycle succeeds about 1.7% of the time without help.
Why it matters Reliability over many steps, not one impressive move, decides whether a robot is useful at work.
IFR: 5 million industrial robots now work in factories worldwide
Added Official record
The global stock of industrial robots rose 9% to a record 5 million units in 2025, the International Federation of Robotics says. Factories installed more than 600,000 new units; China took 59%, and the US passed Japan as the second-largest market.
Why it matters Factory arms, not humanoids, are where robots already work at scale: the baseline humanoids are measured against.
Skild AI trains a humanoid soccer policy through 140 simulated years of self-play
Added The company's own figures
Skild AI says it trained a policy through 140 years of simulated play, then transferred it to a humanoid robot. It says dribbling, shielding the ball and tackling emerged because they helped the model score, without hand-crafted rewards.
Why it matters Practice in simulation is one way robot makers try to get around how little real-world robot data exists.
A remote-controlled humanoid knocks down a human boxer at a San Francisco event
Added Reported by OECD AI Incidents MonitorPartly steered by a person
At a robot combat event in San Francisco, a Chinese-made T800 humanoid, remotely operated but AI-stabilised, knocked down a human boxer, the OECD AI Incidents Monitor records, citing Chinese news sites. It files the incident as a physical injury.
Why it matters Fight shows put strong, fast robots within reach of people, and a person was hurt with a human at the controls.
Boston Dynamics opens an Atlas training centre at Hyundai's Metaplant America
Added The company's own figuresAutonomy: not stated
Boston Dynamics launched the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, where trainers teleoperate Atlas to teach it tasks. It speaks of beginning with 25,000 units at Hyundai Motor and Kia plants over the next few years, and of component assembly by 2030.
Why it matters It ties a humanoid to a carmaker's plan with a number and a date. Both are plans, not deliveries.
Figure says its robot did chores in 30 homes it had never seen, 56% of the time
Added The company's own figures
Figure tested its Helix 2.5 policy on tidying living rooms, folding towels and making beds in 30 Bay Area homes with no data collected in them. Pretrained on its Index data, the policy succeeded on 56% of trials, against 9% for a policy trained from scratch.
Why it matters Working in a stranger's home is the hard test for home robots. These are Figure's own blind evaluations; a safety intervention counted as a failure.
Agility unveils Digit 5, built to work near people without safety barriers
Added The company's own figures
Agility says Digit 5 can work in close proximity to people without the physical safety barriers of traditional automation, lift loads of up to 50 lb (22.7 kg) and do more than 20 hours of productive work in a 24-hour day. Early access is expected in the first half of 2027.
Why it matters Traditional automation needs safety barriers, Agility says. The standard for balancing robots that work near people, ISO 25785-1, is still in development.
A humanoid makes uncontrolled movements during a test at Unitree in Shaoxing
Added Reported by OECD AI Incidents Monitor
During a test at Unitree Robotics in Shaoxing, China, a humanoid robot malfunctioned, made uncontrolled movements and kicked a remote control from an engineer's hand, the OECD AI Incidents Monitor records, citing Hungarian and Turkish news sites. No injury is reported.
Why it matters Even in a maker's own test area, a fast-moving humanoid can come within reach of the people around it.
Skild AI says it passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue
Added The company's own figures
Skild AI says it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue ten months after its first commercial deployment, with more than 60 paying customers.
Why it matters A revenue figure from a robot-AI company, as the company itself states it.
UBTECH reports 921 full-size humanoids sold in the first half of 2026
Added Official record
UBTECH's interim results, filed with the Hong Kong stock exchange, show 921 full-size humanoid robots sold in the first half of 2026, up 1,946.7%, and RMB590.3 million of revenue from them, up 1,445.0%. It reports project deliveries to OPmobility, Jabil, Foxconn and Honda.
Why it matters A humanoid sales count from an official filing, not a press release.
Counterpoint counts more than 22,000 humanoids shipped in the first half of 2026
Added Reported by a news outlet
Counterpoint Research says global humanoid shipments topped 22,000 units in H1 2026, nearly 300% more than a year earlier. AgiBot shipped around 9,700 and Unitree more than 7,000. Manufacturing took 13% of shipments and warehousing and logistics 5%.
Why it matters Shipments are rising fast, but most humanoids still go to entertainment, research and data production, not factory or warehouse work.
What AI robots can and can't do today. Measured where we can, and labelled when it's a company's own claim.
What robots can do today
Each ability sits on one of four steps, with the evidence behind it.
Walk and keep balance on the job
Level: In paid daily work4 of 4
Not available yet
Shown in tests
In pilots and trials
In paid daily work
Why this step, and the evidence (2)
Humanoids walk through paid shifts at a few named sites. The hours on record are the makers' own figures.
What would move it up: Hours worked counted by someone other than the maker, at more customers
Agility reports more than 65,000 hours of operation (company figure)The company's own figuresAgility Robotics
Digit works for GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Agility saysThe company's own figuresAgility Robotics
Rated
Move totes and parts in warehouses and factories
Level: In paid daily work4 of 4
Not available yet
Shown in tests
In pilots and trials
In paid daily work
Why this step, and the evidence (2)
Paid work at a handful of named sites, reported by the makers themselves.
What would move it up: More sites per customer, and uptime figures that someone other than the maker publishes
Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes at GXO's Flowery Branch site in Georgia (company figure)The company's own figuresAgility Robotics
UBTECH reports project deliveries of wheeled humanoids for industrial logistics to OPmobility, Jabil, Foxconn and HondaOfficial recordUBTECH (HKEX filing)
Rated
Work a full shift without a person stepping in
Level: Shown in tests2 of 4
Not available yet
Shown in tests
In pilots and trials
In paid daily work
Why this step, and the evidence (3)
Round-the-clock tests exist, but people still refill or rescue the robots, and some robots fail.
What would move it up: A multi-day run with interventions per hour counted by someone other than the maker
AgiBot's 24-hour store trial: four of six robots passed the final assessment (company test)The company's own figuresAgiBot
Dyna's 24-hour napkin-folding run: a person had to keep refilling the robot's napkin binThe company's own figuresDyna Robotics
Bank of America: current humanoids are too fragile and maintenance-intensive for 24/7 industrial workReported by Bank of America InstituteBank of America Institute
Rated
Do chores in a home it has never seen
Level: Shown in tests2 of 4
Not available yet
Shown in tests
In pilots and trials
In paid daily work
Why this step, and the evidence (2)
Company and lab tests show partial success; no maker has announced robots doing this for customers.
What would move it up: Paid home deliveries, or a higher score in the BEHAVIOR Challenge 2026
Figure: 56% success on three chores in 30 unseen homes (company test)The company's own figuresFigure AI
Labs show progress in tests, but the people building robot hands still call multi-finger dexterity hard.
What would move it up: Multi-finger hands doing paid assembly or packing work
Google DeepMind: multi-finger dexterous manipulation "remains challenging" for Gemini Robotics 2The company's own figuresGoogle DeepMind
Rodney Brooks: a human hand has about 17,000 low-threshold touch receptorsReported by Rodney BrooksRodney Brooks
Rated
Work beside people without safety fences
Level: Shown in tests2 of 4
Not available yet
Shown in tests
In pilots and trials
In paid daily work
Why this step, and the evidence (3)
Shown in company tests among the public; Agility says Digit 5, due for early customers in 2027, is built for it. The safety standard for such robots is still in development.
What would move it up: Digit 5 working beside people at a customer site, or ISO 25785-1 published
AgiBot: six G2s worked 24 hours among customers in an operating Shanghai convenience store (company test)The company's own figuresAgiBot
Agility: Digit 5 can work close to people without physical safety barriers; early access in the first half of 2027The company's own figuresAgility Robotics
ISO 25785-1, safety requirements for industrial mobile robots that balance actively, is a project, begun 9 January 2026Official recordDIN
Rated
A chore-doing home robot you can buy and receive
Level: Not available yet1 of 4
Not available yet
Shown in tests
In pilots and trials
In paid daily work
Why this step, and the evidence (3)
UBTECH has delivered U1 companion humanoids since September 2026; most cannot do household chores, The Standard reports. 1X takes orders for its NEO home robot; no delivery is announced.
What would move it up: A maker confirms deliveries to paying households
The Standard: UBTECH began delivering its U1 companion humanoids in September; most versions cannot walk independently or do household choresReported by The StandardThe Standard
1X's order page: "US Deliveries start 2026"The company's own figures1X
MIT Technology Review: for now NEO needs a remote human operator to do most thingsReported by MIT Technology ReviewMIT Technology Review
Next update: 1X's promise falls due on 31 December 2026
StatusPeriod: 13 November 2026
In development
Safety standard for walking and balancing industrial robots
prEN ISO 25785-1, a project since 9 January 2026, covers industrial mobile robots that keep their balance actively. One estimate puts publication in late 2026 or 2027.
Forecasts of how many humanoids will ship or sell in 2026, on one scale. Each line says what it counts. We'll set these against the first full-year counts when they're published.
Counterpoint Research: more than 50,000global humanoid shipments, 2026, published
Status, specs, sources and newsStatus, sources and news
Status: Early access expected in the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of 2027 (Agility's targets). Agility calls its specs preliminary estimates.
Status, specs, sources and newsStatus, sources and news
Status: By 29 April 2026 Figure's BotQ plant had delivered over 350 Figure 03s, for its own R&D, data collection, housework and commercial use-case efforts; no customer is named. In June 2026 it showed one at BMW's Spartanburg plant.
Status, specs, sources and newsStatus, sources and news
Status: In training at Hyundai's Metaplant America. All 2026 deployments are committed to Hyundai and Google DeepMind; more customers are planned for early 2027.
Status, specs, sources and newsStatus, sources and news
Status: UBTECH's 2026 interim results report Walker S2 deliveries continuing to expand. It publishes no list price; its other specs appear only in an image.
Status, specs, sources and newsStatus, sources and news
Status: Six ran a 24-hour store trial in Shanghai in November 2026. AgiBot's product page gives no height, weight or price; the G2 Max version has 21 degrees of freedom and a 40 kg dual-arm capacity.
Status, specs, sources and newsStatus, sources and news
Status: Mass production targeted for late 2026, first deliveries in the first half of 2027 (Xpeng's targets). Xpeng gives no height or weight; its IRON page lists 22-degree-of-freedom hands.
How a robot with an AI brain sees, decides and moves, in six short reads.
The parts of an AI robot
Eyes: cameras
Head: the AI computer
Chest: the battery
Joints: motors
Hands: grippers with touch sensors
Our robot is drawn for this page. It is no company's design.
1Eyes, brain, body
Cameras, and on some robots touch sensors, feed an AI model. One part plans: it reads the scene and the instruction and works out the steps. Another part, a "vision-language-action" model, turns each step into motor commands, and a fast controller keeps the body balanced. NVIDIA calls the two parts System 2, which "interprets the environment through vision and language instructions", and System 1. Google calls its planner "a high-level brain for robots".
Robots mostly learn by copying. People steer a robot through a task while every move is recorded (teleoperation), companies film people at work, and robots practise in simulation. Data is short: nothing like the text that trained chatbots exists for robots. "There is no dataset for robotics that approaches that scale," IEEE Spectrum reported. NVIDIA says it trained its GR00T 2 model on robot and human data, including 100,000 hours of first-person video of people that NVIDIA has released as open source.
A human hand has about 17,000 touch receptors, the roboticist Rodney Brooks writes, citing earlier research. Most robot training data is video, and he argues that "collecting just visual data is not collecting the right data". Google DeepMind wrote in July 2026 that "the multi-finger dexterous manipulation remains challenging." Legs are further along: Figure says its walking controller, trained in simulation, worked on the real robot with no extra tuning.
A long job is a chain of small steps, and the robot has to get every one right. Dyna Robotics did the sum for a laundry job of 79 steps: a robot that gets each step right 95% of the time finishes the whole job only 1.7% of the time. That is arithmetic, not a test, but it is why the number to ask for is full-job success, and how often a person had to step in.
After step 1: 95%After all 79 steps: 1.7%Each dot is one of the 79 steps. It fades as the chance that every step so far went right shrinks.
By their makers' own figures, humanoids work for a few hours per charge: Unitree G1 about 2 hours, 1X NEO 4 hours, Boston Dynamics Atlas 4 hours, Figure 03 5 hours "at peak performance". Makers work around it. Atlas walks to a station and swaps its own battery, and Agility says Digit 5, due in 2027, will run for 90 minutes and recharge in 9.
Before you trust a robot video, ask three things: was the robot acting on its own, was a person steering it from afar, and was the clip sped up? "In many instances, humans are controlling the robot or have carefully scripted its actions," MIT Technology Review wrote in October 2026. Remote help can be part of the product: for tasks its NEO home robot doesn't know, 1X says "an Expert from 1X can remotely supervise its actions at scheduled times".
One common claim about robots, checked against the evidence. A new one comes up each day.
Myth
“Humanoid robots already do chores in people's homes.”
Verdict: Not yet
1X takes orders for its NEO home robot, but said in April that the NEOs coming off its factory line were being prioritized for its own team, and its news page announces no customer delivery as of 13 November 2026. Figure's test in 30 homes it had never seen succeeded 56% of the time, in an evaluation Figure ran itself.
“If a video shows a robot doing a task, the robot did it on its own.”
Verdict: False
MIT Technology Review: "In many instances, humans are controlling the robot or have carefully scripted its actions." On 1X's order page, an expert from 1X can remotely supervise NEO at scheduled times. Rodney Brooks wrote in January 2026 that all in-person demonstrations of manipulation are tele-operated. Ask whether a demo is autonomous, steered by a person, or sped up.
“Benchmark scores near 100% mean robots have mastered handling objects.”
Verdict: False
Models that score over 90% on the standard LIBERO test fall to 0.0% under the harder setting of LIBERO-PRO, a 2025 study whose authors blame rote memorisation of action sequences and layouts from training. A high score on a familiar test can mean the model learned the test.
“Household chores are the easy first job for humanoids.”
Verdict: False
The paid humanoid work makers name is in warehouses and factories: Digit at GXO, UBTECH's deliveries to Foxconn and Honda. The winner of the BEHAVIOR Challenge 2025 fully finished 12.4% of its household tasks on held-out test instances. In 2025 the top use of professional service robots was transport and logistics, with 117,500 sold, the IFR says.
“Robots can now learn any task just by watching videos.”
Verdict: Contested
Video is now a big ingredient: NVIDIA trained GR00T 2 partly on 100,000 hours of first-person recordings of people, and Dyna says its Dyna-2, pre-trained on human video alone, passed 87% of customer acceptance tests on a stationary robot. Rodney Brooks argues that "Collecting just visual data is not collecting the right data": video carries no touch.
Battery runtimes as the makers publish them: Unitree G1 about 2 hours, 1X NEO 4 hours, Atlas 4 hours (it swaps its own battery), Figure 03 5 hours. Agility's more than 20 hours a day for Digit 5 is a target for 2027. Bank of America: current humanoids "remain too fragile and maintenance-intensive for 24/7 industrial environments".
“A capable humanoid now costs about as much as a used car.”
Verdict: Mostly false
Unitree sells its G1 from $13.5K, and advises buyers to understand the limitations of humanoid robots first. Bank of America puts the parts of pilot-stage humanoids at $90,000 to 100,000 per unit, and estimates a China-built humanoid's parts at $35,000 in 2025.
The IFR counts about 7,000 full-size humanoids sold worldwide in 2025, against 5 million industrial robots working in factories. Counterpoint counts more than 22,000 humanoids shipped in the first half of 2026. Thousands to tens of thousands a year, not millions.
“Humanoids are safe to work right next to people.”
Verdict: Not yet
ISO 25785-1, the safety standard for robots that balance actively, is still a project. Agility's site says "Certain safety features are still in development." Unitree asks users to keep a sufficient safe distance. Rodney Brooks advises keeping 3 meters from full-size walking robots. A former Figure safety head alleged in a lawsuit that its robots could fracture a skull; Figure denies it.
“A robot that gets each step right 90% of the time can do the whole job.”
Verdict: False
Mistakes compound. Dyna Robotics' arithmetic: a laundry cycle has about 79 steps, and at 95% per step the whole cycle succeeds 1.7% of the time without help. The BEHAVIOR Challenge 2025 winner scored a 26% Q-score, yet fully finished 12.4% of tasks on held-out instances. Ask for whole-job success and how often a person steps in.
“Robots that win sprint races are close to human-level.”
Verdict: Mostly false
Tiangong Ultra won the large-size 100 m at the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games in a Games-record 8.64 seconds. Hands are another matter: in July 2026 Google DeepMind said multi-finger dexterous manipulation "remains challenging", and a human hand has about 17,000 touch receptors (Rodney Brooks). Legs are ahead of hands.
“Simulation can replace practice in the real world.”
Verdict: Mostly false
Simulation is essential for training, but NVIDIA says "Accurate physics is critical to transferring learned skills from simulation to the real robot." Torsten Kroeger of Intrinsic told IEEE Spectrum: "there's just no physics engine out there that can accurately model physical contact with the world." Contact-heavy work is where simulation still falls short.
Every entry links to the page we read it on, and we open every source ourselves. We copy the exact sentence behind each number, and we say whose claim it is: an official record, the company's own figures, a news outlet's report, or a forecast. When sources disagree, we show both or leave the number out. We never print a number we only saw in a search result, a headline or a fan site. Each entry is checked against our notes by a separate AI reviewer before it goes up. When we get something wrong, we correct the entry, date the correction and list it below.
Humanoids and other general-purpose robots, and the AI models, data and chips that drive them: where they work, what they cost, the money behind them, the rules and their safety. Robotaxis, drones, surgical robots and factory arms come in only when the news says something about AI robots in general. Safety incidents are reported as facts, with no private names.
What the labels mean
Status
Confirmed
It happened. The source is the party itself, an official record, or two independent outlets.
Announced
A company or government says it will happen. The announcement itself is confirmed.
Reported, not confirmed
A named, reputable news outlet reports it. The party has not confirmed it.
Whose claim it is
Official record
A filing, a regulator, a government, a standards body or official results.
The company's own figures
A company speaking about itself, its own tests included. Not checked by anyone else.
Reported by …
A reputable news outlet's own reporting.
Forecast
An analyst's or a company's projection, not a count.
Allegation, disputed
A claim made in a lawsuit or complaint. The other side disputes it.
Capability steps
1Not available yet
No robot does it outside a lab.
2Shown in tests
Done in lab, company or competition tests, not yet for customers.
3In pilots and trials
Done at customer sites, on trial.
4In paid daily work
Done for paying customers as everyday work.
Who was in control
Autonomy: not stated
The source does not say whether the robot acted on its own.
Steered by a person
A person controlled the robot, on the spot or from afar.
Partly steered by a person
The robot acted on its own for part of the work, and a person steered the rest.
