Do you think we'll see humanoid robots in retail stores within 5 years?

[carol.robinson]

Counterpoint: 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. 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.

[ivan22]

Appreciate the detailed answer. 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. 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. Makes me wonder how this looks in another five years.

[servoken70]

@ivan22 I'd take that specific number with a grain of salt, honestly. 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 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.

[garcia51]

@servoken70 +1 to this. Worth adding: 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.

[rao91]

@garcia51 Here's the relevant bit as far as I understand it: 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.

[shill]

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

[carol.robinson]

@shill Can I ask a dumb follow-up - 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. 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.

[chloe_jack]

This matches what I've seen too. 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.

[gary.tanaka2]

This raises a question for me - 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.

[rossi30]

Minor factual note: 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.