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.
Humanoid robots work in 52 places we can name and source. Eighteen of those are car plants. Twenty-six are live today, as an active deployment or a pilot. Six disclose how many robots are on site, and those six add up to 41 machines. That is the whole counted total, in an industry that talks in thousands.
Car plants first, then everything else
| Sector | Rows | Active | Pilot | Announced | Unclear | Ended | Rows with a unit count | Units |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Automotive | 18 | 4 | 6 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 20 |
| Other manufacturing and services | 11 | 0 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Logistics | 5 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Entertainment | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 16 |
| Retail | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Research | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Home | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Healthcare | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Hospitality | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
Automotive is more than a third of the record, and 11 of its 18 rows are in China. BYD, Zeekr, Geely Auto, Audi FAW NEV, BAIC, Dongfeng Liuzhou and Nio host UBTech’s Walker S1 and Walker S. Mercedes-Benz runs Apollo. BMW ran Figure 02. Hyundai has announced the electric Atlas. Schaeffler has both Digit and 4NE-1. Magna took Phoenix. UBTech alone accounts for 9 of the 52 rows. China (22) and the United States (16) hold 38 rows; ten other countries share 14.
What the robots do there is narrow. Of the 34 industrial rows, 24 describe handling, inspection, sorting or moving totes. Six mention assembly, and it is light: Xpeng Iron drives screws on Xpeng’s own P7 line, Walker S applies labels and checks seat belts at Dongfeng. The job a humanoid does is to pick something up, carry it, and look at it.
Half the rows are live, half are not
The status column reads 11 active, 15 pilot, 8 announced, 8 unclear, 10 ended. Active plus pilot is 26, half.
A pilot on this site is a robot doing work at a named customer’s site for a limited time. It counts as a deployment, and in the Humanoid Index a named pilot scores like a named active row: 20 of the 50 deployment points, 28 for three or more. It cannot climb higher: the 32 to 50 band needs verified unit counts of ten, a hundred and a thousand, and no robot in our record gets there.
Announced means a customer name and no robot yet: Hyundai, the China Mobile tender, 1X’s consumer deliveries. Unclear means we found the start and not the present: Sanctuary at Magna, the Optimus at the Tesla Diner, Amazon’s Digit test, three UBTech car plants. The ended row that matters most is Figure 02 at BMW Spartanburg, a production run Figure describes as 11 months, from August 2024 until Figure AI moved to Figure 03 in late 2025. The fleet size was never published.
Six rows put a number on it
The 41: twenty Walker S at Dongfeng Liuzhou, an order announced in February 2024, status pilot. Sixteen Unitree H1 dancing at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala on 28 January 2025, for one night. Two Digits at Ford in 2020. One Robonaut 2 on the ISS from 2011 to 2018. One Phoenix at a Mark’s store in Langley for one week in March 2023, teleoperated, 110 tasks. One Optimus serving popcorn at the Tesla Diner in July 2025, continuation unclear.
Sixteen of the 41 are a dance and 20 are an order. Only the Dongfeng row is still live. Of the 15 rows we mark autonomous, one discloses units, and it is the dance.
The thousands live in a different column. Our notes record the claims: UBTech planned about 500 Walker S2 deliveries in 2025, Unitree is widely reported to have sold thousands of G1 units to labs with no official count, Galbot targets 100 unstaffed pharmacies. Each is a plan, a target or a report, not a count at a named site, so none of it goes in the units column. The only machines here with real volume behind them are Pepper, about 27,000 built before production stopped in 2021, and NAO, more than 13,000 sold by 2018. One is 120 cm tall, the other 58 cm. Neither is what anyone means today by a humanoid at work.
Mixed is the most common word for autonomy
The autonomy column reads 31 mixed, 15 autonomous, 2 teleoperated, 4 unknown. Mixed means the maker claims autonomy and the footage or fine print keeps a human in the loop. In automotive it is 14 of 18. The two teleoperated rows are both Phoenix, whose own record lists teleoperation as yes.
Nine of the 15 autonomous rows are commercial work, by Figure 02, Apollo, Digit, Galbot G1 and the announced Atlas. The other six are three Pepper rows, NAO, ASIMO and the dance. The strongest row is Digit at GXO’s Spanx site in Flowery Branch: a pilot from October 2023, a multi year contract from June 2024, autonomous, still active, fleet size not published.
The robot records add a layer. Their teleoperation field says yes for NEO, Optimus Gen 2, Phoenix and Robonaut 2, partial for Walker S1, Walker S2, Digit, Apollo, Atlas, 4NE-1, the G1 and the H1, and no for Figure 02, Figure 03, Galbot G1 and Pepper. So NEO’s household chores may be done by a remote operator; 1X’s own 2025 home alpha is recorded as largely teleoperated.
How to read the next deployment announcement
Look for four things. A customer name: 46 of our 52 rows have one, and an undisclosed customer is a claim, not a deployment. A unit count at the site: 6 of 52 have one, and a plan, a target or an order is not a count. A status word: pilot is real work with an end date, announced is no robot yet. And the autonomy claim, checked against the machine’s teleoperation record. If the two disagree, believe the record.
If you are deciding whether to buy, invest or bet a production line on a humanoid, the sourced evidence is 41 machines at customer sites, 20 of them in one order. Everything larger is a forecast.
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).
UBTech Walker S2
Walker S2 is UBTech's 2025 industrial humanoid and the first to swap its own battery, allowing round-the-clock operation. It has 52 degrees of freedom and is the product behind UBTech's large 2025 order announcements.
Digit (v1 to v3)
Digit added a torso, arms and perception to the Cassie legs and was first shown in February 2019. Ford bought the first two units in 2020 for last-mile delivery research, and v2 and v3 added better perception and hands-free manipulation of totes. These versions were superseded by the 2023 Digit.
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.
Unitree H1
H1 is Unitree's first full-size humanoid, revealed in August 2023. It set a walking speed of 3.3 m/s and performed the first standing backflip by a full-size electric humanoid in March 2024. Sixteen H1 units danced on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in January 2025.
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.
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.
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.
Robonaut 2
Robonaut 2 was developed by NASA and General Motors and became the first humanoid robot in space when it launched to the ISS in February 2011. A leg set arrived in 2014 but hardware faults limited its use and it returned to Earth in 2018. Its dexterous hands influenced later industrial humanoids.
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.
Pepper
Pepper is a 120 cm wheeled humanoid designed by Aldebaran for SoftBank and launched in June 2014 as a social robot for shops, banks and homes. About 27,000 were built before production paused in 2020. It is the most widely deployed social humanoid to date.
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.
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.
Atlas (electric)
The electric Atlas, revealed on 17 April 2024, replaced the hydraulic Atlas with a fully electric design whose joints rotate through 360 degrees. Boston Dynamics is developing it as a commercial factory robot with Hyundai Motor Group and using large behavior models from Toyota Research Institute and Google DeepMind. A production-intent version was unveiled at CES in January 2026.
4NE-1
4NE-1 is the humanoid from Neura Robotics of Metzingen, Germany, first revealed in 2023 and shown in a third generation at Automatica 2025. Neura, founded by David Reger in 2019, also makes cognitive industrial robots and positions 4NE-1 for factories and later households.
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
- 01UBTechUBTech
- 02Figure newsFigure AI
- 03GXO newsroomGXO
- 04Agility RoboticsWikipedia
- 05Sanctuary AI newsSanctuary AI
- 06UnitreeUnitree
- 07
- 08Pepper (robot)Wikipedia
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.
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.
How long does a humanoid robot actually run
22 of 182 humanoids on record quote a runtime. The claims run from 1 to 8 hours with a median of 4, and of the 44 machines you can order, 4 say anything at all.