Home Humanoid: Google DeepMind Shows Apptronik’s Robot Doing Real-World Tasks - Forbes
The latest hardware and software is getting much better at demonstrating that promise. Figure, which has shown its humanoid robot running smoothly and gracefully, has also shown Figure dealing with typical home challenges: putting dishes in the dishwasher...
Key takeaways
The most recent headlines show a rapid push toward commercially viable humanoid robots. In early December, Google DeepMind partnered with Apptronik to demonstrate a humanoid that can perform everyday household chores—such as loading a dishwasher and storing groceries—using foundation‑model AI combined with refined hardware, suggesting a near‑universal robot worker that can understand instructions, plan multi‑step actions and adapt to new objects with near‑human dexterity. At the same time, the Silicon Valley Humanoids Summit highlighted a surge of Chinese manufacturers, especially Unitree, whose inexpensive models dominate U.S. labs, while China’s government incentives aim to establish a full humanoid ecosystem by 2025. The event also featured Agility Robotics’ warehouse robot Digit being deployed at a Texas distribution center for Mercado Libre, and noted the continued absence of Tesla’s Optimus project despite Elon Musk’s earlier promise of availability within three to five years. Industry observers see China gaining momentum, but U.S. AI expertise remains strong, leaving the ultimate market leader still uncertain.
The latest hardware and software is getting much better at demonstrating that promise. Figure, which has shown its humanoid robot running smoothly and gracefully, has also shown Figure dealing with typical home challenges: putting dishes in the dishwasher, putting groceries away, and so on. The pace of development has massively accelerated in the past two years thanks to better AI, better hardware, and cheaper components. If this most recent lab-based demo proves durable in the real world, it signals something fairly consequential. DeepMind and Apptronik are fusing high-quality humanoid hardware and foundation-model intelligence into a general-purpose robot that can perform a broad range of everyday physical tasks with minimal retraining. The result, potentially, could be the long-imagined “universal robot worker:” a cost-effective machine that can understand instructions, plan multi-step procedures, adapt to new objects and execute tasks with near-human dexterity.
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