The "humanoid valley" is closing faster than anyone predicted
Three years ago, commercial humanoid robotics felt a decade away. New data from pilot programmes suggests the deployment curve has bent sharply.
Image credit: Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash · source
Three years ago, the consensus view inside robotics was that commercial humanoids were a decade away. The consensus has shifted.
Bloomberg counts 47 commercial humanoid pilots this year, up from 9 last year and just 1 the year before. That is not a smooth growth curve. That is a bend.
What changed
Three things, in roughly equal proportion.
The first is the underlying AI. Vision-language-action models, the same family of architectures that power the best chatbots, turn out to work for embodied tasks when trained on demonstration data. Each new release narrows the gap between "robot in a paper" and "robot in a warehouse".
The second is hardware cost. Electric humanoids share most of their bill of materials with electric cars. The same suppliers, the same motor and battery technology, the same software-defined approach to control. Cost curves on EVs are now cost curves on humanoids.
The third is customer demand. The Financial Times reports that the largest humanoid makers describe queues of customers willing to pay for pilots, not just willing to be in demos. That is a different commercial position from where the industry was twelve months ago.
We are revising our timelines. — McKinsey partner (via Bloomberg)
The pilot is not the deployment
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