🤖 Humanoid Market Snapshot

Good Morning, Roboticists!

Humanoid robotics is starting to look overbuilt before it is understood.

REPORT

Humanoid Robots Are Shipping Fast, Without Clear Jobs Yet

👀 What’s happening: A new industry report from Informa Tech's Omdia shows global humanoid robot shipments reached about 13,000 units in 2025. Chinese vendors dominated volume. AgiBot ranked first with roughly 5,168 units, followed by Unitree with a few thousand more, and UBTech around one thousand. U.S. players like Tesla and Figure AI remain at pilot scale.

🌍 How this hits reality: The ranking reflects manufacturing capacity more than market pull. China shipped over three quarters of global volume, helped by prices as low as $6,000 to $14,000 per unit and strong policy support. But most deployments sit in factories, labs, or demos. Few robots generate direct ROI. They replace neither a full worker nor a fixed machine. The industry is moving hardware faster than workflows can absorb it.

🤖 Key takeaway: Humanoid robots are winning the shipment race before winning a job. Until a repeatable, high value use case appears, volume alone will not translate into durable leadership. The next inflection comes from application fit, not faster factories.

NEW LAUNCH

A Robot Family Reunion

👀 What’s happening: Chinese carmaker Chery Group rolled out a full lineup of robots through its unit AiMOGA Robotics. Humanoids, police bots, and care robots shared the stage. It was framed as a debut of embodied intelligence, not a lab demo but a ready made family.

🌍 How this hits reality: The lineup looks impressive on paper. Forty plus degrees of freedom. Multilingual speech. Fast task learning. A sales robot. A patrol robot. A care robot. The problem is that this kind of all at once reveal usually signals shallow depth. Each role implies very different sensing, safety, and reliability requirements. Doing all three well is hard. Doing all three at once is usually theater.

🤖 Key takeaway: This feels less like a breakthrough and more like a catalog preview. Most of these robots are likely fragile demos dressed as products. The real signal is intent, not capability. Execution will be the brutal filter.

DANCE

A Humanoid Dances the Charleston

👀 What’s happening: A Chinese humanoid robot named Adam is making the rounds by dancing the Charleston, a routine no other robot had tried before. Built by PNDbotics, the demo is pure flex. New dance equals new innovation. The subtext is obvious. If it can dance like this, notice us.

🌍 How this hits reality: Technically, it is impressive. Forty one degrees of freedom, high torque QDD actuators, and low latency control keep the robot balanced and on beat. A Charleston stresses timing, coordination, and recovery better than another slow warehouse walk. Still, factories do not pay for rhythm. They pay for uptime, safety, and boring repetition.

🤖 Key takeaway: Showmanship is becoming the fastest way to signal progress in humanoids. It proves control maturity, but adoption is another question. Until these moves translate into cheaper, safer labor, the gap between viral demos and real factory demand stays wide.

QUICK HITS

• XPeng has rolled out its first automotive-grade ET1 humanoid robot prototype, moving closer to mass production later this year.
• Airbus is buying UBTech’s Walker S2 humanoid robots to test their integration into aircraft manufacturing and assembly lines.
• DEEP Robotics has launched an AI-powered, robot-dog firefighting system designed to handle dangerous missions too risky for human responders.
• Unbox Robotics has raised $28 million led by ICICI Venture to expand its AI-powered warehouse automation.
• BionIT Labs has launched Adam’s Hand, delivering medical-grade prosthetic dexterity to humanoid and service robots.

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