Humanoid robots step up their game: how useful are the latest droids?

In November, Chinese firm UBTECH announced that it had made “the world’s first mass delivery of humanoid robots”. More than 1,000 of its Walker S2 model humanoids were sent to factories in 2025, says Yu Zheng, a roboticist and vice-dean of the UBTECH Research Institute in Shenzhen. The silver-white humanoid can walk autonomously and stably, as well as grab and move objects, but deployment “is still at an early stage”, says Zheng. Search author on: PubMed Google Scholar

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Humanoid robots are on the brink of being commercially useful, say Chinese and US firms that have announced plans to produce them at scale in the past three months.

Many researchers agree that there has been a step change in humanoid capability over the past five years, owing to cheaper parts as well as innovations such as improved battery power and artificial-intelligence algorithms, which allow for better perception and autonomy. ## Car makers

Humanoids first application could be in car factories. Some US robotics developers, including Boston Dynamics and Tesla, are running pilots of humanoid robots in their parent company's industrial plants. The automotive industry is “an ideal setting” in which to apply humanoids, says Carolina Parada, based in Boulder, Colorado, who leads the robotics team at Google DeepMind, which last week announced a partnership with Boston Dynamics. Their factories host diverse and complex tasks and “in a semi-structured environment that is built for robots”, she says.