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Robotics & Automation 1 month ago

Humanoid robots at home? Overhyped. In warehouses? Underhyped.

by Lucas Muller

I work on automation, so this is my soapbox. The home is the hardest environment that exists: unstructured, unpredictable, full of edge cases and liability. A humanoid reliably folding your laundry is a decade-plus away. But structured environments — warehouses, factories, fulfilment — are already being transformed, just not by humanoids. Wheeled, armed, purpose-built robots are quietly eating logistics. Form follows function; the human shape is mostly for the demo video and the funding round.

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Comments

Emma Thompson 1 month ago

As a hardware founder: the funding-round point is painfully accurate.

Zoe Mitchell 1 month ago

Our fulfilment partner automated 40% of picking last year. Zero humanoids involved.

Zoe Mitchell 1 hour ago

Warehouse ops perspective: the ROI math is brutal and simple. A robot working 20 hours a day in a controlled aisle pays for itself in months. A humanoid that unloads YOUR dishwasher has to beat a free alternative: you. Warehouses first, homes last.

Lucas Muller 1 hour ago

Update since I posted this: toured a fulfillment site last month where the robots-to-humans ratio crossed 3:1, and every remaining human does exception handling. The interesting shift isn't "robot replaces person". It's "person becomes the robot's escalation path."

Priya Nair 1 hour ago

The data angle on humanoids: warehouses generate millions of labeled repetitions of the same task; homes generate thousands of unlabeled one-offs. Robot learning goes where the data is. That alone predicts Lucas's ordering.

Rhys Engel 7 minutes ago

Ops lead at a Rotterdam fulfilment site here, so this thread is basically my Monday. Lucas is right, but I'd sharpen "warehouses underhyped": the ROI isn't the humanoids, it's purpose-built AMRs and fixed arms. Agility's Digit is shuttling totes at Amazon and GXO now and it's genuinely useful — but it's moving ~15kg bins, not doing the clever picking. TrendForce has ~50k humanoids shipping in 2026, a 700% jump, and nearly all of it is still pilot lines earning their keep on one task. My rule on the floor: I don't buy the form factor, I buy the months-to-payback. A boxy arm that pays back in 14 months beats a gorgeous humanoid that pays back never. Humans didn't leave — we became the exception handlers Zoe's describing, and that job got harder, not easier.

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