Robotics Summit panel explores the state of humanoid robot design - The Robot Report
“We brought it to CES this January for a whole week, just demoing, and next year, we’re going back,” Rodriguez added. “This year, we’re going back to the factory to show a more end-to-end demonstration of Atlas — a full learning pipeline, not just handling...
Key takeaways
Humanoid robot activity is accelerating worldwide. In Beijing, Lingyi iTech’s new factory has already built 300 units just weeks after opening and aims to reach 10,000 this year, with a long‑term goal of 500,000 annually by 2030, a scale that could halve the current $30,000 price tag. China is also assigning digital ID numbers to every humanoid to track safety and lifecycle data, while a government showroom is displaying models such as the 199,000‑yuan Booster T1 and the 350,000‑yuan R1 Pro, with cumulative orders topping 30 million yuan as of late May. Demand, however, still lags capacity: Omdia reports that 13,000 humanoids shipped in 2025, and Morgan Stanley expects Chinese sales to double to about 28,000 units in 2026, with annual shipments potentially exceeding one million by the early 2030s. Companies such as Matrix Robotics, Unitree and AGIBOT are scaling production, with Unitree delivering over 5,000 units in 2025 and Matrix targeting 5,000 deliveries this year after receiving roughly 1,000 orders from hotels and coffee chains. In the West, Standard Bots secured a $1 billion valuation after a $200 million Series C, while Figure announced rapid ramp‑up of its humanoid line and a logistics partnership with Catalyst Brands. The UK‑based Humanoid firm signed a proof‑of‑concept deal with Bosch to move toward mass production, and Boston Dynamics pledged to deliver up to 25,000 Atlas units to customers such as Hyundai, expanding its capacity to 30,000 robots per year by 2028. New hardware breakthroughs include Rotaku’s Domo platform for developers priced at $2,999, Sharpa’s Wave tactile hands integrated into Unitree’s H2 Plus reference design on Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T framework, and MIT’s ultrasound wristband that captures hand‑muscle motion to generate training data for dexterous manipulation. Agile Robots showcased force‑control and humanoid technologies at the Robot Technology Japan event, highlighting its AgileONE humanoid and recent acquisition of thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering. Across these developments, the industry is moving from lab demos toward scaled manufacturing, tighter software integration, and real‑world commercial deployments.
“We brought it to CES this January for a whole week, just demoing, and next year, we’re going back,” Rodriguez added. “This year, we’re going back to the factory to show a more end-to-end demonstration of Atlas — a full learning pipeline, not just handling the behavior, but handling the entire workflow, connecting to the factory, and handling exceptions.”
He also noted that in Boston Dynamics’ journey to mass-production scale, the company has now secured enough customers (including Hyundai) that it has committed to deploy on the order of 25,000 humanoids in factories. Boston Dynamics has made an additional commitment to ramp up production capacity to 30,000 Atlas robots per year by 2028. Home
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- RBR50 Winners 2023 Agility (formerly Agility Robotics) has also moved past pilot projects. It has worked on Digit humanoid deployments with companies including Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, Toyota, and Mercado Libre.
“We’ve really been expanding the commercial side and learning from that to figure out — what do we need to close the remaining gaps that allow us to scale?” said Velagapudi. “That’s a couple of different things: It’s discoveries around what we needed out of the safety case, which has been a huge piece of all of this with an incredibly powerful, dynamically stable robot. How can we move around these facilities and be able to work in closer proximity or without guarding around humans?”
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