What does 'general purpose' really mean for a humanoid in practice today?

[samuel.adams]

Figured this was worth its own thread rather than burying it in another one. Legs earn their keep specifically where the environment wasn't redesigned for robots - stairs, curbs, uneven yards, cluttered floors - which is a smaller slice of real-world tasks than the marketing suggests. The labor-substitution narrative gets simplified a lot in pitch decks; the more honest framing right now is 'augmenting understaffed, high-turnover roles' rather than wholesale replacement. Most flashy demo reels involve some amount of teleoperation, scripted sequencing, or cherry-picked takes - that's not necessarily dishonest, but it does mean the gap between 'demoed' and 'reliably autonomous in production' is still large. Genuinely not sure where I land on this, so discuss.

[garcia51]

@samuel.adams Just to be precise about one thing: 'General purpose' in 2026 mostly means 'can be reprogrammed for a new task without new hardware,' not 'can walk into any environment and figure things out unsupervised.'

[scott.andersson5]

@garcia51 This matches what I've seen too. A recurring pattern in the field: a capability looks solved in a controlled demo, then takes another 18-24 months of engineering to become boringly reliable in the field.

[mia_lars]

This is a great summary, thanks. Open-source humanoid projects matter less for out-competing the well-funded players and more for keeping the barrier to entry low enough that new ideas and new people can actually get into the field. Roughly 7,000-8,000 commercial humanoids are estimated to be operational worldwide as of mid-2026, which sounds like a lot until you compare it to the millions of industrial arms already installed.

[joseph31]

Pretty much this. One thing to add: The uncanny valley matters a lot less in a warehouse than in a living room - nobody cares if a picking robot looks a little stiff, but a home-companion robot with a slightly-off gait reads as unsettling fast. The safety case for humanoids working near people usually leans on compliant/backdrivable joints plus soft force limits, but there isn't yet a mature, widely-adopted standard equivalent to what industrial arms have had for decades.

[jlefebvre]

Ran into exactly this myself. A genuinely underrated bottleneck is neither hardware nor pure ML - it's the unglamorous integration work of making perception, planning, and control agree with each other reliably for eight-hour shifts.

[erik_novi]

@jlefebvre Thanks for laying this out, genuinely useful. The 'humanoid' form factor mostly wins on infrastructure compatibility, not raw efficiency - stairs, doors, and tools were all built for a human body plan, so a legged, two-armed robot slots into existing spaces without retrofitting them. Automotive plants ended up as the first serious proving ground for humanoids mostly because they already have structured environments, safety processes, and budget for automation - not because car assembly is uniquely suited to bipeds.

[jessica_faro]

@erik_novi This raises a question for me - A lot of the current wave genuinely is repackaged 2000s and 2010s research (ZMP walking, whole-body control, DARPA-era grasping) combined with two things that weren't available then: cheap high-torque-density actuators and large-scale learned policies.

[wei_ross]

@jessica_faro I'd frame this differently. Elder care is one of the most emotionally appealing use cases and also one of the hardest, because it demands both physical safety around fragile people and social/communication skill that's still far behind the manipulation hype.

[forgecam45]

@wei_ross I'd push back on this a bit. The safety case for humanoids working near people usually leans on compliant/backdrivable joints plus soft force limits, but there isn't yet a mature, widely-adopted standard equivalent to what industrial arms have had for decades. Roughly 7,000-8,000 commercial humanoids are estimated to be operational worldwide as of mid-2026, which sounds like a lot until you compare it to the millions of industrial arms already installed.