How humanoids learn to read the room - The Robot Report
Conclusion As humanoids move into more complex roles, the safety, sensing and interaction demands will only grow. Ostrem believes the future lies in better AI at the edge — both in terms of reaction time, safety and battery life.
Key takeaways
The most recent headlines show that humanoid robotics are moving quickly on both industrial and consumer fronts. A two‑year‑old British startup, Humanoid (formerly SKL Robotics), has signed an upgraded agreement with German industrial giant Schaeffler to integrate at least 1,000 wheeled humanoid units into the company’s factories, with plans that could scale to a four‑digit deployment by 2032 and potentially 100,000 robots across all clients over the next five years. In parallel, California‑based Figure AI demonstrated that its Helix‑02 humanoids can operate autonomously for more than 24 hours straight, sorting thousands of packages without any failures, after initially completing an eight‑hour shift. Meanwhile, Sanctuary AI’s founder James Wells reiterated that fully commercial home‑use humanoids are still three to seven years away, even as the company’s 1X line begins full‑scale production of the Neo robot, which is already being pre‑sold for delivery by the end of this year. Finally, the open‑source community gained a new entrant with the release of Asimov v1, a DIY humanoid kit priced around $15,000 that offers 25 degrees of freedom and a Raspberry 5‑based compute stack, lowering the barrier for hobbyists and small‑scale developers to experiment with humanoid platforms.
Conclusion
As humanoids move into more complex roles, the safety, sensing and interaction demands will only grow. Ostrem believes the future lies in better AI at the edge — both in terms of reaction time, safety and battery life.
ADI already has sensing and perception, connectivity and battery management figured out in the automotive sphere. The natural next step is leveraging those technologies into emerging applications like humanoids.
“In some ways, humanoid robots are where cars were many years ago,” says Ostrem. “The architecture isn’t fully set, and there is significant room for industry collaboration around standardizing interfaces to stimulate the ecosystem around humanoid robots.”
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Situational awareness with humanoid robots starts with vision, especially in environments where people and equipment are constantly moving. A humanoid robot needs to see and understand its surroundings in order to react quickly and appropriately, whether that’s to pick up an object or move away from a person. Standard human vision can be approximated with RGB image sensors, along with depth perception achieved through time-of-flight, structured light or stereo vision methods.
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