The world isn’t quite ready for humans yet

Renowned roboticist and iRobot founder, Rodney Brooks, has sounded the alarm about the investment bubble in humanoid robots. He’s not the only one.

In a Recent articlecalls out Brooks Billions of dollars are being pumped into humanoid robotics companies Like the shape. His point: Despite the amount of money being pumped into the industry, humanoid robots will never be able to learn dexterity — or the fine motor movements of the hands — rendering them essentially useless.

His opinion may surprise some, especially those investment companies that invest in this sector. But not to Many venture capital companies focus on robotics And AI scientists, who told TechCrunch in recent months that they don’t expect to see widespread adoption of humanoid robots for at least a few years — if not more than a decade.

Issues

Fadi Saad, general partner at robotics-focused VC Cybernetix Ventures and former co-founder of MassRobotics, told TechCrunch that other than sending humanoid robots into space instead of human astronauts, he doesn’t see a huge market yet.

“People who may not have seen hominins before, or haven’t followed what’s happening closely, are impressed with what’s happening now in hominins, but we’re still a little bit conservative and skeptical about the actual use case and the actual revenue that will be generated,” Saad said.

Saad is also concerned about safety, especially when humans and humanoid robots share the same space. Safety issues can arise from people and humans working closely together on the factory floor or at other industrial sites. These concerns increase when humanoid robots enter people’s homes, a goal that many humanoid manufacturers are working toward, Saad says.

“If this thing falls on pets or children, it will hurt them,” Saad said. “This is just one aspect of a huge hurdle that no one pays attention to, or very few people care about. The other thing is, how many people are comfortable having a human being in their house and sitting there? What if it gets hacked? What if it gets crazy at night and starts breaking things?”

The timeline for this technology is also not clear — a critical factor for venture capital firms that have life cycles and timelines for returning capital to investors.

Timetable

Sanja Fiedler, vice president of AI research at Nvidia, told TechCrunch in August that while the evolution of humanoid robots is difficult to pin down on a specific timeline, she compared the current interest to the excitement in the early days of self-driving cars.

“I mean, look at self-driving cars, in 2017 and 2016, I mean they were tangible, right?” Fiedler said at the time. “It took them a few years to really scale, and so far, no one has really scaled to the entire world, complete autonomy. It’s difficult. It’s really difficult to move forward and fully deliver on this technology.”

Nvidia chief scientist Bill Daly agreed in an interview with TechCrunch. Dally and Fidler’s comments are particularly notable as Nvidia is also pouring money into developing infrastructure for human-powered companies.

Although it’s easy to get excited as every new technological development occurs, or the latest demonstration occurs, humanoid robots are incredibly complex, said Seth Winterroth, partner at Eclipse. He added that it will take some time before they reach their full potential.

“It’s hard to release software with six degrees of freedom, and what we’re talking about with some of these humans is over 60 degrees of freedom,” Wentroth said, regarding the robot’s ability to move on a 3D axis. “Then you need to be able to get good unit economics around that solution, so that you have a strong gross margin, so that you can build a sustainable business. I think we’re still very early.”

In most cases, humanoid robots are not ready for the world yet.

Tesla is a great example of the difficulties companies face. the The company announced that it is building its own robotOptimus, again in 2021. The following year, Tesla said The robot will be introduced in 2023.

This did not happen. When the robot was introduced in 2024 at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event – it was later revealed that the robots were It is largely controlled by humans Out of the scene. The company claims that it will start selling robots in 2026.

Start robots The figure amounted to $39 billion At a fundraiser in September, that happened, too Raised doubts about the number of hominins The company has already published it, a claim the company vigorously defends.

What works

This does not mean that humanoid robots will not have a market in the future or that the technology is not worth working on.

Brooks himself said he had no doubt that we would have human beings in the future. But instead of what the market pictures when they hear humanoids, a human-shaped robot, they expect they will likely have wheels and other inhuman features and won’t be out for more than a decade.

There are startups working on dexterity technology that Brooks doubts humanoid robots can reach, including… Y Proception powered by Combinator and Lumeawhich has designed a kit that could help robotics companies start incorporating touch into their devices.

There are also several human-powered companies that have started receiving orders and generating interest in their robots. K-Scale Laboratories It received more than 100 pre-orders for its automated bot in the first five days, which surprised even the founders, CEO Bingham Bolte told TechCrunch.

Hugging Face has also seen strong developer demand for its automated bots. Company Pre-orders opened For a smaller desktop release, the Reachy Mini, in July. The reaction was clear. Just five days after opening orders for its Reachy Mini robots, Hugging Face recorded $1 million in sales.