Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?

You could easily walk the entire Automate floor without spotting a single humanoid. There was a grand total of three, by my count — or, rather, three units of the same nonworking prototype. Neura was showing off its long-promised 4NE-1 robot, amid more traditional form factors. There was a little photo setup where you could snap a selfie with the bot, and that was about it.

Notably absent at the annual Association for Advancing Automation (A3) show was an Agility booth. The Oregon company made a big showing at last year’s event, with a small army of Digits moving bins from a tote wall to a conveyer belt a few feet away. It wasn’t a complex demo, but the mere sight of those bipedal robots working in tandem was still a showstopper.

Agility chief product officer Melonee Wise told me that the company had opted to sit this one out, as it currently has all the orders it can manage. And that’s really what these trade shows are about: manufacturers and logistics companies shopping around for the next technological leg up to remain competitive.

How large a role humanoids will play in that ecosystem is, perhaps, the biggest question on everyone’s mind at the moment. Amid the biggest robotics hype cycle I’ve witnessed firsthand, many are left scratching their heads. After all, the notion of a “general purpose” humanoid robot flies in the face of decades’ worth of orthodoxy. The notion of the everything robot has been a fixture of science fiction for the better part of a century, but the reality has been one of single-purpose systems designed to do one job well.

While there wasn’t much of a physical presence, the subject of humanoids loomed large at the event. As such, A3 asked me to moderate a panel on the subject. I admit I initially balked at the idea of an hourlong panel. After all, the ones we do at Disrupt tend to run 20 to 25 minutes. By the end of the conversation, however, it was clear we easily could have filled another hour.

That was due, in part, to the fact that the panel was — as one LinkedIn commenter put it — “stacked.” Along with Wise, I was joined by Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders, Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas and Neura CEO David Reger. I kicked the panel off by asking the audience how many in attendance would consider themselves skeptical about the humanoid form factor. Roughly three-quarters of the people present raised their hands, which is more or less what I’d anticipate at this stage in the process.

As for A3, I would say it has entered the cautiously optimistic phase. In addition to hosting a panel on the subject at Automate, the organization is holding a Humanoid Robot Forum in Memphis this October. The move echoes the 2019 launch of A3’s Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) Forum, which presaged the explosive growth in warehouse robotics during the pandemic.

Investors are less measured in their optimism.

“A year after we laid our initial expectations for global humanoid robot [total addressable market] of $6bn, we raise our 2035 TAM forecast to $38bn resulting from a 4-fold increase in our shipments estimate to 1.4mn units with a much faster path to profitability on a 40% reduction in bill of materials,” Goldman Sachs researcher Jacqueline Du wrote in a report published in February. “We believe our revised shipment estimate would cover 10%-15% of hazardous, dangerous and auto manufacturing roles.”

There are, however, plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Hype cycles are hard to navigate when you’re in the middle of them. The amount of money currently changing hands (see: Figure’s most recent raise of $675 million) gives one pause in the wake of various startup collapses across other fields. It also comes during a time when robotics investments have slowed after a few white-hot years.

One of the biggest risks at this stage is the overpromise. Every piece of new technology runs this risk, but something like a humanoid robot is a lightning rod for this stuff. Much like how eVTOL proponents see the technology as finally delivering on the promise of flying cars, the concept of personal robot servant looks within reach.

The fact that these robots look like us leads many to believe they can — or soon will be able to — do the same things as us. Elon Musk’s promise of a robot that works in the Tesla factory all day and then comes home to make you dinner added fuel to that fire. Tempering expectations isn’t really Musk’s thing, you know? Others, meanwhile, have tossed around the notion of a general intelligence for humanoid robots — a thing that is a ways off (“five to 10 years” is a time frame I often hear bandied about).