The Humanoid Hype Meets Reality

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China has just announced that a bubble is forming in the humanoid robot market.
Only now. As if someone noticed water in the bathtub at the moment when the neighbors downstairs were already flooded.

The National Development and Reform Commission says they have more than 150 companies making humanoids. Most of them almost identical. Only the logo differs and the demo for the media is edited in a slightly different way. And suddenly everyone pretends to be surprised that this might end badly. The internet reacts in the usual way. Some people say that we have seen this before, others that this is how it has to be. Classic silly season in robotics.

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And this déjà vu is hard to ignore.
We also had our own version of "humanoids", only smaller and more polite. They were called cobots. We were promised they would kill industrial robots. That factories would turn into playgrounds where people and robots would hand each other snacks. That heavy machinery with proper kinematics would no longer be needed.

It ended with cobots staying exactly where they make sense. And automation did what automation does. It tightened the cycle. Increased the speed. Sorted the mess.

That is why, when I hear today that humanoids will "change everything", I have a problem.
Because humanoids really stimulate the imagination. R&D teams love them. Labs breathe the topic in like fresh air. And thanks to this, many interesting things are created around them: better drives, sensors, motion control and mechanical designs. That is the real benefit.

The humanoid itself, though, still does not have many places where it can actually work. Not in a factory. Not in a warehouse. Not at a supermarket checkout. Too expensive. Too fragile. Too similar to a human who is having a bad day and does not feel like doing anything.

Meanwhile, all signs suggest that the world still prefers reliable things. SCARA. Delta. Six axis robots. Machines that do not need to look like us to do the work we do not want to do anymore.

So maybe the NDRC announcement is not a great discovery but simply arriving late to their own meeting.
Maybe the bubble started growing much earlier.
And maybe now other countries will slowly have to wake up from the humanoid dream, before they find themselves with a wet floor and no money left for real robotics.

Cheers, Jacek