General-purpose humanoid robots: products, deployments, manufacturing milestones and the companies behind them.
Hyundai’s robot maker has picked a chief executive whose record is in shipping AI models to consumers, not in building machines. That says where it thinks the hard part now sits.
A lawmaker used two Chinese robots to make a supply-base argument: Korea’s public labs and museums already run on Chinese humanoids, and its robot foundation model budget was zero until 2025.
Another Chinese robot under $20,000 is for sale in America. Whether it can be delivered depends on an FCC authorization the company has not mentioned.
Panasonic already sells parts for humanoids. Its case for building the whole robot starts with the part it knows best.
Most Korean humanoid programmes stop at the demo. This one names three warehouses, a list of tasks and a year for the first robot on site.
Korea’s navy has tested a humanoid at a ship’s wheel and Japan is studying them for base patrols. AeiRobot’s selection comes with dedicated money and a route to military trials.
Seoul opened its biggest physical-AI showcase yet with a keynote that cut against its own message: the robots are arriving faster than the places that have to use them.
The 200,000 figure counts every kind of robot, bought by industry and the state together. The narrower numbers — and the cluster in Gumi and Pohang — show where the money is meant to go.
Boston Dynamics did not copy the human hand. It counted actuators, removed a finger, and built the rest to be simulated and manufactured.
Samsung’s robotics lab brought a cost sheet, not a demo. The same day, its subsidiary Rainbow Robotics signed a factory-automation partner to test the numbers on a real line.
Count what is actually on a Korean line and the list is short: two robots in a demonstration centre, one bound for a food plant and a government project that runs to 2030. The rest is agreements and targets.
The stunt is the headline. The reason Figure gave is the story: keeping an older fleet running would have cost engineering time it needs for F.04.
Korea’s delivery-robot maker is not building a walker. It is putting two arms on the navigation stack it already runs across a fleet of 400-plus robots.
Tesla built several hundred Optimus V3 units a week in August and targets 1,000+ by year-end, per The Information. Our tracker sets release date, price and output promises against what happened.
AGIBOT has built 20,000 robots, doubling its March total. The half-size X-series is 43.8% of output, and the count is production, not sales.
UBTech began delivering its UWorld U1 companion humanoid on September 16, priced from RMB 119,800 to RMB 990,000. It reports 13,361 orders; early owners call the motion stiff.
Unitree’s G1+ adds a two-joint neck, 110% more shoulder and waist torque and a 3 kg arm payload, at $15,000 against the G1’s $13,500.
Japan’s defence procurement agency is set to study AI humanoids for base patrols and logistics, with a competition for companies and universities. Combat use is ruled out for now.
Munich’s Vesoma came out of stealth with more than 60 staff, 3,500 m² of labs and a former Google DeepMind research director as chief AI officer. First Vesoma 1 units are being built; funding is undisclosed.
Robros’s 154 cm IGRIS-C humanoid can now walk and work under real-time full-body teleoperation. The company has built 36 units and sold 18, with paid trials in a chip cleanroom, a car plant and a cold-chain warehouse.
Apptronik’s CEO says the US is short of humanoid gears, and actuators can be 60% of the parts bill. XPeng just signed its actuator suppliers. Who builds joints in-house, and who buys them.
Every humanoid price we could trace to a maker, filing or named report, as of September 28, 2026: from $4,900 for a Unitree R1 to $129,900, and the four big names with no price at all.
AgiBot and Unitree ship about three quarters of the world’s humanoids. Every 2025 and H1 2026 count compared, with the definitions that explain why they disagree.
Every disclosed humanoid factory and warehouse deployment, sorted into production, pilot, internal and announced. Only Figure at BMW and Agility at GXO have published enough to judge.
Twelve dexterous robot hands compared by active degrees of freedom, tactile sensing, payload and price, from the $3,500 ORCA to the 22-DoF Unitree Dex5-S and SharpaWave.
The first Seoul edition of the summit put a Korean actuator maker’s humanoid next to NVIDIA’s model roadmap. The production numbers are small today and the target is for next year.
Two more joints than the Dex5-1 and all of them motor-driven. Weight, grip force and tactile sensing are not yet published.
The Robotics Metaplant Application Center replaces time-boxed Atlas trials with a standing facility for data collection and task testing. Parts sequencing comes first; component assembly is a 2030 goal.
The International Federation of Robotics has put a first number on the humanoid market. It is small next to conventional robots, and many of the units sold were bought to generate data rather than to work.
The target is five times the Hayward factory’s ramped capacity and depends on a second plant that mostly comes online late in 2027. Børnich frames reliability, not output, as the constraint.
The plant is designed for roughly five times the full-size humanoids UBTech has sold since the start of 2025. Capacity is the easy number; utilisation is the one to watch.
New legs, a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio and a safety system meant for shared floors. The order book is large; 2025 sales were not.
Selling a humanoid is a transaction. Keeping one working at a customer site is a service business, and in Japan it now has a vehicle.
Hyundai Motor Group is keeping the costliest part of its humanoid inside the group. The parts maker that builds its car modules now builds Atlas’s joints.
IL supplied its ILBOT H2 humanoid to Galaxy Robot Park, extending its deployment strategy into entertainment and visitor-interaction data collection.
Robotics is the growth story a 1.5%-margin carmaker can tell using assets it already owns. The parts of a humanoid business that assembly lines cannot supply are the parts nobody has yet.
Surgical robotics has been an arm on a cart for twenty years. Choosing a humanoid form is a claim about the operating room being un-redesignable — not a claim about autonomy.
The sector has spent two years being judged on video. XPeng has just moved the argument to the one place humanoid companies have consistently lost it: the factory floor.
The show date will get the headlines. The org chart is the part worth reading: Samsung has handed a software executive authority over the mechanical design too.
Humanoid startups begin with a body and hunt for a task. Doosan is starting from tasks it already sells and adding legs last — a slower route with one obvious problem: the date.
No prototype, no timeline, no manufacturing partner — a podcast statement and roughly 11 open San Francisco robotics roles covering actuator design and hardware engineering.
A labour ministry guideline issued September 3 splits the automation decision from its employment consequences — and lands in the middle of Hyundai Motor’s dispute over Atlas.
A 178cm robot nicknamed Hinata, run with KDDI and AVITA, answers transfer and sightseeing questions in about 60 languages — Umeda through September 6, Tanimachi 9-chome September 9 to 15.
Up from 21 in the 2022 original. Xiaomi says task success on a nut-fastening line at its EV factory went from 90% to 98% over about four months — company-reported, internal deployment.
Interim results, August 28. Humanoids became the largest revenue line for the first time at RMB 590.3m on 921 units; gross margin 44.7%; net loss narrowed 23.0% to RMB 338.8m; R&D at 23.9% of revenue.
Atlas onto HMGMA lines from 2028, global sites from 2030, and a US robot factory producing from 2028. RMAC is already running 67 task items across five vehicle models and expands tenfold by year-end.
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.
Which South Korean companies actually build physical AI? Hyundai and Boston Dynamics lead on hardware, ROBOTIS owns the actuator layer, NAVER runs the largest service fleet, and Rainbow Robotics has the clearest near-term revenue event in its Army quadruped.
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.