Hugging Face launches agentic toolkit for Reachy Mini - The Robot Report

Humanoid robotics are making headlines across industry and consumer domains. British startup Humanoid (SKL Robotics Ltd.) announced a dramatically expanded partnership with German industrial group Schaeffler that will see at least 1,000 wheeled humanoid units—potentially many more—deployed in Schaeffler factories by 2032, with the company aiming to ship up to 100,000 robots over the next five years. In the consumer arena, Figure AI released a video showing two of its Helix 02 humanoid robots making a bed faster than a human, underscoring the company’s push to handle more complex household tasks after retraining the bots on new data. Japan’s aviation sector is testing humanoid robots on the tarmac at Haneda Airport, where Japan Airlines and GMO AI & Robotics will evaluate the machines’ ability to move baggage and cargo in a trial slated to run through 2028. Meanwhile, the Institute of Science Tokyo opened an unmanned laboratory featuring a humanoid called Maholo LabDroid, part of a plan to automate almost all research processes and eventually expand to around 2,000 robots by 2040. In the hardware market, Chinese robot maker Unitree unveiled the GD01, a ten‑foot, half‑ton transforming mech that can switch between bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion and is priced at roughly $650,000. These developments illustrate a rapid escalation in both the scale of industrial deployments and the sophistication of humanoid capabilities for everyday and specialized tasks.

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