General-purpose humanoid robots: products, deployments, manufacturing milestones and the companies behind them.
Oh Jun-ho — HUBO’s creator, Rainbow Robotics’ founder, head of Samsung’s future robot task force — says Samsung plans a humanoid presentation at ICRA 2027. Attribute carefully: an interview remark, not an announcement.
HD Hyundai and POSCO are the disclosed partners. Welding tops out near 1 cm per second because that is how fast metal melts, which removes the speed comparison humanoids usually lose.
Actuators are around half the cost of building a humanoid, and the gearbox inside them is machined one part at a time. Schaeffler is forming it instead — seconds instead of minutes, 25% less cost, production in 2027.
The MOU is the usual kind. The date is not — Q1 2027, on Isaac GR00T and Jetson Thor — and neither is the Tennessee washing-machine line that gets a wheeled CLOiD before this year ends.
Ten companies, five layers, and one category with no domestic competition. Korea is not going to win physical AI on humanoid unit volume — it is positioned in components, captive demand and one thing nobody else is selling.
Not a moonshot number — a procurement number. And the accompanying R&D line names exactly the three parts Korea still has to buy from someone else.
BYD confirmed a first humanoid for early August at its Di Space experience venues. Reported specs put it at 1.61 metres and 58.5 kilograms with 31 degrees of freedom — and the job description is greeting buyers, not moving parts.
Tau Robotics opened an invite-only cleaning service in San Francisco on July 28. The price is the least interesting number: every visit is recorded as depth, telemetry and operator input, which is the product the company is actually building.
Humanoids and quadrupeds went on the Covered List on July 28. The immediate commercial damage is small, because most Chinese humanoid makers were barely selling in the US anyway. The durable effect is on what American labs can buy.
Intelligent devices, then intelligent spaces, then city-level intelligence. The framing is tidy; what makes it credible is a robotics cluster that will also do contract manufacturing for companies that cannot build their own.
The robot was built to fly aircraft by reading manuals and moving human controls. The Navy pointed the same idea at a ship's wheel, because the sailors to turn it are running out.
AgiBot told Chinese media it is putting domestically made chips into cerebellum control, joint microcontrollers and communications. The high-level brain in its flagship humanoid still runs on NVIDIA silicon — which is exactly where the substitution story currently stops.
Samsung Electronics elevated robotics to a CEO-led division on July 21, folding scattered efforts into one unit and doubling down on humanoids — a sign the physical-AI race now has a Korean electronics giant fully in it.
The World Artificial Intelligence Conference became a humanoid showcase: AgiBot rolled out four new machines led by its A3 Ultra, and Unitree teased a 2.7-meter transformable GD01 — new hardware, still short on prices and independent testing.
The Chinese carmaker says it will lift monthly output of its IRON humanoid past 1,000 units by year-end and put the robot to work in its own showrooms in early 2027 — a plan that leans on XPeng's car factories, not a robotics moonshot.
All of 2026's electric Atlas output is committed to Hyundai and Google DeepMind, and the robot did the World Cup honors in July — yet sustained production-line work is a 2028 target, not a 2026 one.
Twenty independently driven joints, exports to 19 countries, and a candid admission that nobody in the industry can yet certify 10,000 hours between repairs.
Apptronik's second-generation humanoid ships with a flagship data-collection and training facility attached — the clearest evidence yet that the moat in embodied AI is shifting from actuators to training data.
Three pillars, one reporting line, and a Yangjae building whose only job is to manufacture robot training data. The org chart is the strategy.
The Chinese firm says its 15,000th unit — a wheeled G2 — came off the line on June 28, with production accelerating and a research firm ranking it first in 2025 humanoid shipments.
With a humanoid listed near $13,500 and quadrupeds in the low four figures, Unitree is seeding a developer ecosystem the way cheap GPUs once seeded deep learning.
1X's NEO is a home-first humanoid — $20,000 outright or $499 a month, first US deliveries in 2026 — a consumer bet that stands apart from the industry's factory focus.