If you could design a humanoid from scratch, what would you change first?

[noah_pate]

@scott21 Here's what I know on this: 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. 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.

[dchen]

Tangent, but worth mentioning: 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. 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.

[deborahperez]

Genuine beginner question - 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. 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. Kind of makes me think about how different this all looked even three years ago.

[servoken70]

@deborahperez Slight correction, though the overall point stands: 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.

[deborahperez]

New to this, so forgive me if this is obvious - 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.

[zoeanderson]

@deborahperez Slight correction, though the overall point stands: 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. 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. Totally unrelated but has anyone else noticed how fast component costs are dropping this year.

[deborahperez]

@zoeanderson 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. 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.

[park44]

From hands-on experience, 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. Kind of makes me think about how different this all looked even three years ago.