What humanoid robots can actually do in 2026
Of 182 humanoid robots on record, 117 have a human in the loop, 33 have ever worked at a customer site and none has a verified fleet count. Here is what that leaves.
Humanoid robots in 2026 can walk over rough ground and get up when they fall, move totes between a mobile robot and a conveyor, load parts in a handful of car plants under supervision, and do household chores with a person steering from somewhere else. That is the demonstrated list, checked against our record of 182 machines and 52 deployments. Everything else in the launch videos is, for now, a launch video.
Most humanoids have a person in the loop
| Teleoperation on record | All 182 | Of the 44 you can order |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | 27 | 7 |
| Partial | 90 | 26 |
| No | 31 | 2 |
| Unknown | 34 | 9 |
“Yes” means remotely operated by design, like NEO with its Expert Mode, or Phoenix, trained from teleoperated task data. “Partial” is the biggest pile, 90 machines: the legs run a learned controller on their own, the arms are scripted or driven by a person for the camera. That describes Unitree G1 and most of the Chinese catalogue.
“No” looks good until you check who is in it. 16 of the 31 are retired or discontinued, and 10 of the remaining 15 are university research platforms. That leaves five working machines whose maker states there is no remote operator, among them Figure 02, Figure 03 and Galbot G1. Even there, Figure’s Helix model was trained on teleoperated data. Of the 44 machines you can order today, two are marked “no”, both older platforms: Kawada Nextage and Robotis OP3.
122 of the 182 have any autonomy evidence recorded. For 60 machines we found nothing beyond a reveal.
Five things they demonstrably do
Walk, run, fall and stand up. This is the solved part. Tiangong Ultra finished the 21.1 km Beijing E-Town half marathon in 2 h 40 min 42 s on 19 April 2025. AgiBot A2 walked 106 km from Suzhou to Shanghai in November 2025. Booster T1 played autonomous football at RoboCup 2025 and stood up after falls. All three are flagged “partial”; the claim that holds is the locomotion, a learned policy running on the robot.
Move totes in a warehouse. Digit from Agility Robotics has moved totes from mobile robots onto conveyors at a GXO facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia, since October 2023, converted to a multi-year robots-as-a-service contract in June 2024. GXO calls it the first formal commercial humanoid deployment; we mark it autonomous and active. Fleet size: not published. Apollo ran a GXO tote pilot in 2024 as a proof of concept.
Pilot in car plants. 18 of the 52 deployments are automotive. Figure 02 loaded sheet metal parts into fixtures at BMW Spartanburg for about 11 months across 2024 and 2025. BMW confirmed it, the pilot has ended, fleet size not published. Walker S1 from UBTech handles boxes and does inspection alongside AMRs at BYD, Zeekr, Foxconn and Audi FAW, all marked mixed autonomy. Of the 26 deployments that are active or in pilot, 6 are marked autonomous and 20 mixed.
Household chores, with a person elsewhere. 1X ran a home alpha in 2025 and opened NEO preorders on 28 October 2025 at $20,000. Reviewers at launch found most tasks were teleoperated; 1X calls this Expert Mode. Figure 03’s home alpha is marked mixed, and Figure has not said how many homes are in it. No household humanoid is autonomous at a customer’s address yet.
Serve as a research platform. The G1 is in labs worldwide, widely reported in the thousands, with no official count. iCub and NAO have been research and teaching machines since 2008. One retail exception: Galbot G1 picks medicines in unstaffed Beijing pharmacies, marked autonomous and active, target 100 stores, verified counts pending.
What they do only on camera
Astribot S1 folds clothes and pours wine in its 2024 launch video: partial teleoperation, pilot customers, none named. Dobot Atom made breakfast at launch. Unitree H2 dances and walks a catwalk; verification is limited to trade shows. Optimus Gen 2 units at We Robot on 10 October 2024 were confirmed by Tesla staff to be remotely assisted, and its factory battery-cell sorting has no independent confirmation. Xpeng Iron walked so smoothly on 6 November 2025 that Xpeng cut open its leg on stage to prove nobody was inside. None of this is fake. None of it is a deployment either.
Nobody will say how many are working
The field units_deployed_est is empty for all 182 robots. Of the 52 deployments, 6 carry a unit number, adding up to 41 robots: 20 Walker S ordered by Dongfeng Liuzhou in February 2024, 16 H1 dancing at the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, 2 Digits at Ford in 2020, one Optimus serving popcorn, one Phoenix for a week at a Mark’s store, one Robonaut on the ISS. Every large-sounding deployment, BMW, GXO, BYD, Mercedes, has “not published” against fleet size.
What to ask before you believe it
If you are choosing a machine, ask for four things. One: an unedited take of the task with the whole room visible, and a plain answer to “who is holding the controller”. Two: the customer’s name and the customer’s own statement, not the maker’s. BMW and GXO said it themselves; most did not. Three: the number of robots at that site and the hours they have run. Four: the same task on your parts, in your building. A maker that can supply all four belongs in the “no” row of the table. The rest are selling a video, and for 117 of the 182 machines on record the human in the loop is already in the file.
Unitree G1
G1 is Unitree's compact humanoid, announced in May 2024 at USD 16,000 and now listed at USD 13,500. Its low price and open SDK made it the default research and education humanoid worldwide. Read the configuration carefully: the standard machine does not support your own code, and the EDU version that does starts at USD 43,900.
Tiangong Ultra
Tiangong Ultra is the athletic version of Tiangong that won the world's first humanoid half marathon in Beijing in April 2025, then took track medals at the August 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games.
AgiBot A2
The Yuanzheng A2 family is AgiBot's production line, covering a bipedal interaction robot, a wheeled industrial model, a heavy-duty model and a data-collection model. A2 holds the Guinness record for the longest walk by a humanoid robot.
Booster T1
Booster T1 is a 1.18 m robust humanoid built for research and robot soccer. Its ability to survive falls made it popular with university RoboCup teams.
Digit
The 2023 Digit added a head, improved hands and a taller frame, and is the version Agility Robotics sells as a service for moving totes in warehouses. It was the first humanoid with a paid, multi-year commercial deployment (GXO, 2024) and is built at Agility's RoboFab factory. Schaeffler invested in Agility in 2024 and planned to deploy Digit in its plants.
Apollo
Apollo is Apptronik's general-purpose humanoid, revealed on 23 August 2023, with a 25 kg payload and four-hour swappable batteries. It is piloted by Mercedes-Benz, GXO and Jabil, and Google DeepMind has partnered with Apptronik on its AI. Apptronik's team previously worked on NASA's Valkyrie.
Figure 02
Figure 02, unveiled on 6 August 2024, added onboard speech, six cameras, 16 DoF hands and three times the compute of Figure 01. It became the first Figure robot to work in a customer plant, at BMW Spartanburg, and the platform for the Helix vision-language-action model. Figure retired it in favour of Figure 03 in late 2025.
Figure 03
Figure 03 is Figure AI's third-generation humanoid, unveiled on 9 October 2025 and designed for the home and for volume manufacturing at Figure's BotQ facility. It has soft textile coverings, wireless charging, palm cameras and tactile fingertips, and runs the Helix model onboard. It is the company's first robot designed for mass production rather than hand assembly.
UBTech Walker S1
Walker S1 is the 2024 industrial humanoid that UBTech placed in several Chinese car and electronics plants. It is 172 cm tall, carries up to 15 kg and works with AMRs for material handling.
UBTech Walker S
Walker S was the first industrial version of the Walker line, unveiled on UBTech's Hong Kong listing day in December 2023. It was the first Chinese humanoid to enter a car factory training program (NIO, February 2024).
NEO
NEO is 1X's consumer home humanoid, opened for preorder on 28 October 2025 at USD 20,000 with deliveries planned for 2026. It is about 30 kg, tendon-driven and wears a soft suit, and it uses remote human operators for tasks it cannot yet do autonomously. It is the first humanoid marketed directly to households at a published price.
Phoenix
Phoenix is Sanctuary AI's general-purpose humanoid, first shown as Gen 6 in May 2023 and iterated to Gen 7 in April 2024 and Gen 8 in 2025. Its distinguishing feature is fast, miniaturised hydraulic hands with tactile sensing. Sanctuary has a manufacturing and deployment partnership with Magna.
Galbot G1
Galbot G1 is a foldable wheeled humanoid with two arms that can reach both floor and 2.4 m shelves. It is the first humanoid to run retail stores commercially in China.
Kawada NEXTAGE
NEXTAGE is a humanoid-style dual-arm industrial robot from Kawada that works alongside people on assembly lines, one of the earliest humanoids used in production.
ROBOTIS OP3
ROBOTIS OP3 is the third generation of the open platform humanoid line that started with DARwIn-OP. It is a 51 cm, 3.5 kg kid size research robot with 20 degrees of freedom, an Intel NUC and a ROS based open source software stack. It is used in RoboCup and in teaching labs worldwide.
iCub
iCub is the open-source child-sized humanoid developed by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa from the EU RobotCub project (2004 to 2010). With 53 DoF and full-body tactile skin, it became a standard platform for cognitive robotics research, with dozens of units in labs worldwide. iCub3, a larger 125 cm version, was introduced in 2021.
NAO
NAO is a 58 cm programmable humanoid from Aldebaran, first sold in 2008 and adopted as the RoboCup standard platform. It is the most widely distributed humanoid in education and research with over 13,000 units. The current NAO6 dates from 2018.
Astribot S1
Astribot S1 is a wheeled dual-arm humanoid from Shenzhen startup Astribot (Stardust Intelligence) whose April 2024 video of fast household manipulation went viral. The company says each arm carries 10 kg and moves at up to 10 m/s.
Dobot Atom
Atom is the first humanoid from Dobot, a Shenzhen collaborative-robot maker listed in Hong Kong. It launched at CNY 199,000 with claims of 0.05 mm arm precision.
Unitree H2
H2 is Unitree's third full-size humanoid, revealed in October 2025 with 31 degrees of freedom, 180 cm height and 70 kg weight. It is positioned as a general-purpose and entertainment platform.
Optimus Gen 2
Optimus Gen 2, revealed on 12 December 2023, is about 10 kg lighter than Gen 1, walks 30 percent faster and has Tesla-designed actuators, an actuated neck and tactile fingers. It has been used for internal factory trials and at Tesla marketing events, where it was partly teleoperated. It is the version the public has seen most.
Xpeng Iron
Iron is Xpeng's full-size humanoid, first shown in November 2024 working in its Guangzhou car plant. The 2025 version adds 82 degrees of freedom, a bionic spine, solid-state battery and Xpeng's own Turing chips, with mass production planned for late 2026.
Sources
- 01Unitree G1 product pageUnitree
- 02Agility RoboticsAgility Robotics
- 03GXO newsroomGXO
- 04Figure newsFigure AI
- 05
- 06NEO1X
- 07UBTech Walker S1 pageUBTech
- 08X-Humanoid official siteX-Humanoid
- 09Galbot official siteGalbot
- 10Xpeng newsroomXpeng
How a humanoid robot works: actuators, compute, sensors and the model
Of 182 humanoids on record, 178 say what moves the joints and 43 say what computer is inside. The further a layer sits from the metal, the less the maker tells you about it.
Where humanoids actually work: 52 deployments, counted
We track 52 humanoid deployments at named sites. Eighteen are in car plants, exactly half are live, and six say how many robots turned up. Those six add up to 41 machines.
Who is paying for humanoids: 69 funding rounds
Our funding record holds 69 entries. Take out the government funds, the acquisitions and the IPOs and $6.33 billion of disclosed private money remains. 37 percent of it went to companies with no robot on record.