humanoid robots

What I learned

Figure sent its F.02 robots into a 75-ton arc furnace in Finland, and Reddit couldn't look away

Figure asked online what to do with its retired Figure 02 units, Arnold Schwarzenegger said melt them, and they did, dropping the machines into molten metal at a Finnish foundry per @Figure_robot (374,838 views on the F.02 decommission clip). The r/interestingasfuck thread hit 33,507 upvotes, with the top comment (11,818 upvotes) joking "This is one of the videos they're going to show in history class to the young robots after they take over." On TikTok @exxhibit recapped the 75-ton electric arc furnace footage for another lap, the kind of clip that keeps turning up on Funniest Robot Fails compilation accounts too. The retirement makes more sense in context - Figure has since moved Figure 03 into the logistics sequencing task at the same BMW plant where the 02 units racked up 1,250+ hours and loaded over 90,000 parts before being decommissioned, per humanoid.guide.

Figure 03 has been walking a treadmill for nine straight days

Figure announced the new Figure 03 accumulated 560 kilometers (348 miles) and 1.2 million steps in a nine-day endurance run designed "to stress the robot for any failures" per @thenexai and Humanoids Daily. CEO Brett Adcock confirmed the numbers directly on X, posting the update on October 19 as the walk was "still going" at nine straight days per Brett Adcock, with heise online and Interesting Engineering both framing it as a deliberate stress test meant to surface failure modes that short demos would miss. Figure's own announcement describes the 03 generation as "engineered from the ground-up" for mass manufacturing, built for "Helix, the home, and the world at scale" per Figure.ai. The same gen-3 bot is already running live logistics at the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, which the rokorobot/HumanoidOnline tracker scored at 0.70 manufacturing fit on 2026-10-24, a line item that reads less like a human-touch handoff and more like Automated Guided Vehicles with arms. A broader deployment table from Technology.org puts Figure's BMW fab capacity at 10,000 units/year and lists live customers beyond BMW including GXO, Schaeffler, Toyota Canada, and Mercado Libre.

ETH Zurich taught a Unitree G1 to climb a ladder from 13 minutes of human motion data

Researchers fed the G1 just 13 minutes of demonstration, let it practice in simulation, and now it scans a ladder and plans every hand-and-foot placement itself per @robotics (13,668 views). The underlying research, published as "LadderMan: Learning Humanoid Perceptive Ladder Climbing," confirms the G1 uses "a single perceptive policy via zero-shot sim-to-real transfer" and extends past pure climbing into on-ladder manipulation tasks like adjusting paintings, replacing light bulbs, and handling boxes via teleoperation, per arXiv. It's the same sim-to-real recipe showing up everywhere: Google's Gemini 4 Argon taught a humanoid cornhole from a single video and landed 7 shots in a row, cutting "weeks of robotics engineering down to hours," a post that hit 1,552 upvotes on r/singularity. The GitHub org HumanoidsBonn has been quietly indexing the same class of sim-to-real repos, a reminder that this technique isn't confined to any one lab.

RP1 launched as a fully open-source humanoid stack

@RoboParty_DEV dropped RP1 with 418 likes on the launch post, opening the full hardware and software stack, actuators, motion control, simulation, training tools, to developers. At IROS they literally invited visitors to kick the robot to test balance recovery, per @techniahqrobot, and the teaser clip pulled 78,352 views and 1,258 likes. The "robots start making robots" framing caught on - @Me438487039 riffed that "everyone's first robot will build their second one," a sentiment echoed by commenter @cozy, whose own android-hug clip pulled over 3 million views while people debated whether that kind of human touch from a machine reads as charming or unsettling.

Unitree's H2-X "Kung Fu Legend Guardian" blew up with 3.5 million views

Unitree unveiled the 182 cm full-size H2-X with roughly 8 hours of endurance, pitching it as a bodyguard that shields its owner in a simulated robbery and lifts a car off a trapped person per @unitreerobotics_official (3,545,868 views, 213,098 likes). @cgtneurope ran its own version to 833,225 views. It landed the same week China posted a reported 77.9% of global humanoid shipments in H1 per Hacker News, with regional outfits like Ibaraki Robots and basketball club Levanga Hokkaido both turning up in the same wave of Japanese humanoid-adjacent chatter, alongside hobbyist builds still running on plain Arduino Robot kits at the opposite end of the complexity spectrum. A separate shipment count from Smart Analytics Global puts global humanoid shipments at roughly 19,100 units in 1H 2026, up 272% year over year from 5,100 units in 1H 2025, and notes AGIBOT overtook Unitree for the No. 1 global shipment position even as Unitree kept growing, with Technology.org separately estimating roughly 5,500 Unitree G1/H1 units shipped in 2025 against a 10,000-20,000 target for 2026.

Musk floated Tesla Bot Gen 4 at 10 million units a year, before Gen 3 has shipped

Elon Musk teased a fourth-gen Optimus at a scale of 10 million robots annually ("one every 3 seconds") while the long-promised Gen 3 remains unseen, per PRO ROBOTS, which points out only about 13,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in all of 2025. Production chatter is real though - r/robotics flagged Optimus production starting with a 20,000-robots-weekly target (79 upvotes), and a $30,000 price point drove the debate on @cosmos.evealed01 (125,217 views). A Threads post urging followers to buy a robotics stock "For October 24" before a supposed breakout name-dropped a Tesla partnership in the same breath, which is exactly the kind of claim worth treating with suspicion. Independent tallies back up the skepticism about pace: humanoid.guide calls Tesla "the least verified large program" in the field, noting Tesla had only targeted 5,000 internal-use Optimus units for 2025 doing repetitive work on an active line, a figure dwarfed by the 10-million-a-year Gen 4 pitch.

The $30/hour cleaning-robot pitch got roasted

TAU Robotics claimed humanoid robots that clean your home for $30 an hour, and r/GenAI4all (191 upvotes) wasn't buying it, top comment (88 upvotes): "A lot of it is teleoperation. If the robots are earning $30 an hour, imagine what the operators are earning," with another adding "But I can hire human at the same price. Why would I choose robot?" The skepticism tracks against the hard economics - Micron says each humanoid needs over 200 GB of DRAM and multiple terabytes of NAND per r/datastorage (687 upvotes). GitHub user bmsdebug has filed similar memory-footprint issues against open humanoid firmware repos, underscoring that the hardware tax isn't just a Micron talking point, it shows up in actual bug trackers too, especially once a project's codebase graduates from a hobby board to what engineers keep calling a Complex Architecture. Gartner adds a sober structural note to the hype: through 2028 fewer than 100 companies will progress humanoid proofs of concept beyond experimentation, and fewer than 20 will go live in production for supply chain and manufacturing, with Gartner predicting polyfunctional (non-humanoid) robots will actually win the warehouse while humanoids stall at pilot scale. That's a strange backdrop for projections like IDTechEx, which still forecasts the humanoid market hitting roughly $29.5 billion by 2036 as deployments expand from industrial settings into broader commercial and consumer use.