How do you personally define 'progress' in this field vs marketing progress?

[kwilliams]

Yeah, this tracks with what I've read as well. 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. 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.

[deborahperez]

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

[kwilliams]

From hands-on experience, 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.

[deborahperez]

@kwilliams This matches what I've seen too. 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. 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.

[choi98]

@deborahperez Not sure I fully agree here. 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.

[chenperez]

@choi98 I'd frame this differently. 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. 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.

[deborahperez]

@chenperez This matches something I went through recently. Wheeled-torso designs solve 90% of warehouse and light-industrial tasks with far less complexity than a biped, which is exactly why so many 'humanoid' demos quietly have wheels under a skirt.

[camila.jackson0]

I'd take that specific number with a grain of salt, honestly. 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. Wheeled-torso designs solve 90% of warehouse and light-industrial tasks with far less complexity than a biped, which is exactly why so many 'humanoid' demos quietly have wheels under a skirt. Totally unrelated but has anyone else noticed how fast component costs are dropping this year.

[deborah59]

Slight correction, though the overall point stands: 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.

[chenperez]

@deborah59 Same conclusion I've come to. Also worth noting: 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.