Robotics Tipping Point: A Citrini Field Trip

A flood of viral videos emerged from Beijing showing the advancements in humanoid-form hardware: bots running faster than Usain Bolt, high jumping to ceiling height, and occasionally crashing in comical plumes of sparks and smoke. Unitree’s concurrent IPO helped attract the financial world’s attention.

Humanoid Olympics may seem like an exercise in the absurd, but really are a top-down strategic effort to push the limits of hardware in a competitive, visible and verifiable setting. Sending a humanoid at full sprint into a crash wall is literally “moving fast and breaking things”.

Scoff at your own risk. Americans watching this little guy going out in a literal blaze of glory should be upset it’s not happening in their country. The locomotion of these bots, the speed of iteration in hardware, and a growing list of serious builders, is undoubtedly impressive. But we’ve seen impressive, tele-operated and pre-programmed acrobatics for years. Remember Boston Dynamics caught the world’s attention with its humanoid back in 2009. But these machines remain a Sharper Image novelty without a brain.

Ok… but what about back in May, when Figure AI hosted a nine day livestream of a furiously-dedicated humanoid (team) sorting 250,000 packages – a blend of both autonomous cognition, dexterous manipulation and full body, locomotion, and real world application? As far as where we stand today, here’s what I think is true. The basic locomotion of humanoids is a solved problem that’s only getting cheaper and more accessible (geopolitical and supply chain considerations notwithstanding). Complex dexterity is meaningfully more complicated but is being successfully attacked through multiple hardware approaches. Simple repetitive tasks like package sorting are already readily trainable, unlocking automation opportunities and near-term commercialization while models and bots improve. Complex tasks are coming along faster than you think.

Robotic autonomy is more of a curve than a switch, and it looks something like this.