What's your realistic timeline guess for humanoids folding laundry unsupervised?

[barbara.jones]

Just to be precise about one thing: 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. Makes me wonder how this looks in another five years.

[donna_wata]

@barbara.jones From what I've seen: 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. 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.

[ronald.clark]

@donna_wata Pretty much this. One thing to add: '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.'

[rtorres]

@ronald.clark Not sure I fully agree here. 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.

[tariqlarsen]

This is exactly the kind of context I was looking for. 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. 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.

[nicole10]

I'll believe the stronger version of that claim when it's independently verified. 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. 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.

[servobre20]

@nicole10 Same conclusion I've come to. Also worth noting: 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.

[amandawhite]

@servobre20 One nitpick - 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.