Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not used in the training data, and you will see the real failure rate. These things are not ready for anything besides tech demos currently. Most of the training is done in simulations that approximate physics, and the rest is done manually by humans using joysticks (almost everything they do with hands). Failure rates are staggering.

That's the problem.

An obvious application, if this robot could do it, is retail store shelf restocking. That's a reasonably constrained pick and place task, some mobility is necessary, and the humanoid form is appropriate working in aisles and shelves spaced for humans. How close is that?

It's been tried before. In 2020.[1] And again in 2022.[2] That one runs on a track, is closer to an traditional industrial robot, and is used by 7-11 Japan.

Robots that just cruise around stores and inspect the shelves visually are in moderately wide use. They just compare the shelf images with the planogram; they don't handle the merchandise. So there are already systems to help plan the restocking task.

Technical University Delft says their group should be able to do this in five years.[3] (From when? No date on press release.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHgdW1HYLbM

[2] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/telexistence-convenience-store...

[3] https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/shelf-stocking-ro...

The Telexistence demo isn't so bad, but I have no idea why we're trying to make human robots generally. The human shape sucks at a most things, and we already have people treating roombas and GPT like their boyfriends or pets...

Because human work is designed for humans. If you want a drop-in replacement for human workers, humanoid robots are your best bet.

That doesn’t even remotely follow. Human work is designed for humans so if you want human work done you need a human to do it.

If you want to replace the human the best bet is to redesign the work so that it can be done with machine assistance, which is what we’ve been doing since the industrial revolution.

There’s a reason the motor car (which is the successful mass market personal transportation machine) doesn’t look anything like the horse that it replaced.