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

[joseph_sing]

@rossi30 Here's what I know on this: 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. 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.

[ananya.novak]

@joseph_sing I can speak to this a bit. 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.

[novikova63]

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

[pierregreen]

Slight correction, though the overall point stands: 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 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.