Humanoid robots: machines built in the shape of a person

Humanoid robots are machines built roughly in the shape of a person, with a head, a torso, two arms and two legs. The appeal is that a human-shaped machine could use the doors, stairs, tools and workstations that people already use, without the buildings being redesigned. If that worked reliably, such robots could take on heavy or repetitive jobs in factories and warehouses, and later perhaps help in homes. Walking on two legs is hard, though, and the evidence so far covers walking and early hardware far more than useful work.

What has been demonstrated

The strongest result is in walking. In a preprint first submitted on 6 March 2023, Ilija Radosavovic and colleagues described a controller for a humanoid robot (arXiv). The controller is a transformer, a type of neural network, that reads the recent history of the robot's sensor readings and its own actions, then predicts the next action. It was trained in randomised simulations using reinforcement learning, which means rewarding actions that lead to better outcomes through trial and error. The trained controller was then run on the physical robot without further tuning, a process called zero-shot transfer.

The authors report that the controller walks over various outdoor terrains, is robust to external disturbances, and can adapt in context (arXiv). The peer-reviewed version appeared in Science Robotics on 17 April 2024 with the same wording in its abstract (DOI 10.1126/scirobotics.adi9579, PDF). The robot used was Digit, made by Agility Robotics, and the paper names plazas, pavements, tracks and grass fields among the outdoor settings. The abstract does not give the number of trials, so these results describe what the authors tested, not how the robot would perform everywhere. The abstract covers walking only, not hands or manipulation.

Hardware news is a different matter, because it is an announcement rather than a demonstration. In April 2024, Boston Dynamics announced an all-electric version of its Atlas humanoid to replace the hydraulic model. The IEEE Spectrum report says the new robot is powered by batteries and electric actuators, and that dropping hydraulics removes the hoses, which the article says frees up its range of motion (IEEE Spectrum). The same article reports the company's expectation that Atlas would reach a technology demonstration phase in Hyundai factories "as early as next year", which points to 2025. It also says the author had not yet seen the new Atlas doing any practical tasks. IEEE Spectrum says the robot is meant to continue the older model's work with big and heavy car parts.

What is reported but not yet shown

Most of the recent news is company plans, and it should be read as such. In January 2026, at CES, Boston Dynamics unveiled a production version of Atlas. According to The Register, the company says it is beginning commercial production and has committed to deploying tens of thousands of units across Hyundai Motor Group facilities, starting at Hyundai's Robot Metaplant Application Center "in the coming months" (The Register). Google DeepMind is named as a partner to integrate its Gemini Robotics AI models into Atlas, and the article's subheading says Atlas will go to Hyundai and Google facilities in 2026. The article also relays the company's claim that Atlas can learn autonomously from its environment, using the word "supposedly"; it cites no independent test of this. Boston Dynamics plans to add customers in early 2027 but declined to name any.

The home is a harder target. In October 2025 the robotics company 1X opened pre-orders for its NEO home robot, with an Early Access price of $20,000 or a $499 per month subscription, and says first orders will ship to consumer homes in 2026, mainly in the US (1X). For chores it does not yet know, its page says owners can book a 1X expert to guide the robot through the task. These are company announcements. We found no independent trial results for household work in the pages checked for this article.

Limits and open problems

• Reliability and dexterity. Walking control is not the same as useful work. The 2024 IEEE Spectrum report said its author had not yet seen the new Atlas do any practical tasks, and the pages checked do not report task success rates.
• Scale. The tens of thousands of Atlas units are a plan, not a measured deployment. None of the pages checked reports how many units are working in a factory today.
• Cost. The pages checked give no unit cost for factory humanoids. The only price found is 1X's $20,000 Early Access figure, which is for a different product.
• Battery life. The pages checked do not report how long these robots run between charges.
• Safety around people. The pages checked do not report independent tests of how a humanoid behaves near workers or in a home.

Three states of evidence

Demonstrated: a learned walking controller, trained in simulation and run on a physical humanoid robot outdoors, as the authors report, with the number of trials not given. Reported (company claims or press reports): the 2024 all-electric Atlas announcement, production plans, the Hyundai deployment, and the planned start of 1X home deliveries. Speculative: household help with chores such as laundry, heavy handling on car production lines at scale, and entry into disaster zones. Nothing in the pages checked shows these speculative uses working.

What to watch next

• Published results from real factory or home trials, with task success rates and the number of robots tested.
• Whether the Hyundai deployment starts on the stated timeline, and how many units are confirmed in use.
• Independent safety testing for humanoids working near people.
• Battery runtime and unit cost figures from makers, not only launch prices.
• Whether 1X confirms NEO delivery numbers in 2026, and what owners report after receiving the robot.