Humanoid robots

The same 2026 robotics report says nearly 7,000 full-size humanoid robots were sold worldwide in 2025. IFR counts 174 humanoid makers, more than half of them in China. The report's judgment is blunt: these machines are still crossing from the lab into pilots, not into ordinary deployments.

A humanoid is an attempt to put a general body on the stack that already runs factory arms: motors, sensors, chips, and, newly, vision models from the transformer era. The shape is a bet that a human building is easier to use with a human-shaped machine than to rebuild for wheeled robots. Factories have not paid off that bet yet.

The unsolved pieces are safety, reliability, how long the battery lasts, training data for hands, and a price that beats a simpler machine. IFR says widespread industrial use waits on those. Wheeled warehouse robots are the machines actually moving goods today.

Seven thousand sold is a small industry next to five million arms. Treating 2025 as the year humanoids took over would be false.