Humanoid robots

Marc Raibert (born 1949) is a robotics researcher who built the first self-balancing hopping robots, founded Boston Dynamics, and is now executive director of the Boston Dynamics AI Institute.

A robotics company spun out of MIT in 1992, known for legged and humanoid machines such as BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle, and now majority-owned by Hyundai Motor Group.

Honda's P2, announced in December 1996, was presented as the world's first bipedal humanoid walking robot: a 1,820 mm, 210 kg machine that walked, climbed stairs and pushed carts without cables, and led to ASIMO.

ASIMO is a humanoid robot Honda announced in Tokyo on 20 November 2000, built to walk, climb stairs and work in human-sized spaces; successive versions ran faster and handled objects until its last regular demonstration in 2022.

UBTECH Robotics is a robot company founded in March 2012 that moved from small humanoid robots to full-size industrial humanoids, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2023, and began mass production delivery of its Walker S2 robot in 2025.

Atlas was a humanoid disaster-response robot built by Boston Dynamics for DARPA, unveiled on 11 July 2013 and handed to teams in the DARPA Robotics Challenge; its hydraulic line was retired in 2024.

A Chinese robotics company established in Hangzhou in 2016 that designs and builds quadruped and humanoid robots, selling them at both low starting prices and industrial contract scale.

Tesla revealed a humanoid robot concept, later named Optimus, at its first AI Day on 19 August 2021, describing a person-sized machine meant to take on unwanted work, with a first physical version expected in 2022.

Chinese humanoid robotics company founded in February 2023 by Peng Zhihui, a former Huawei "genius youth"; it builds complete robots and their joint modules, and aims to push hardware costs below 200,000 yuan.

Figure 01 is the bipedal humanoid robot that startup Figure unveiled in March 2023, with design targets of 5 ft 6 in, 60 kg and a 20 kg payload, followed by a coffee-making demo and a BMW manufacturing agreement.

Boston Dynamics unveiled a fully electric Atlas in April 2024, saying it would be stronger, more dexterous and quieter than earlier generations and calling it the start of the robot's commercial journey, with Hyundai as first partner.

Figure 02 is the humanoid robot Figure introduced in August 2024, with redesigned hardware, 16-degree-of-freedom hands and triple the onboard compute of Figure 01. It loaded sheet-metal parts at BMW's Spartanburg plant before being retired in favour of Figure 03.

Isaac GR00T N1 is an open foundation model for humanoid robots that NVIDIA announced on 18 March 2025. It is designed to be post-trained for a specific robot or task, and it pairs a planning model with quick motion control.

Figure 03 is Figure's third-generation humanoid robot, announced in October 2025. It is designed around the company's Helix AI for home tasks and mass manufacturing, with a new camera system, tactile hands and wireless charging.

NEO is a humanoid robot announced by 1X on 28 October 2025 and marketed as the first consumer-ready humanoid: a 66-pound, softly built machine with 22 degrees of freedom per hand, priced at US$20,000 for Early Access or US$499 a month by subscription.

Tesla is the American company behind Optimus, a humanoid robot first shown as a concept at its 2021 AI Day; later reports describe pilot production lines, plans for volume manufacturing and a target unit cost below US$20,000.

Figure AI is a Sunnyvale, California company building general-purpose humanoid robots for industrial work, backed by a large investor group and partnered with BMW Manufacturing.

Brett Adcock is a founder of several technology companies, including the recruiting platform Vettery, the electric aircraft maker Archer Aviation and the humanoid robotics company Figure AI, where he is chief executive.

Robonaut 2 is a humanoid robot built jointly by NASA and General Motors that flew to the International Space Station in 2011 to show how dexterous robots behave in orbit, and later gained legs to move around inside the station.

1X Technologies is the robotics company, founded in 2014 as Halodi Robotics, that builds tendon-driven humanoid robots. In October 2025 it announced NEO, a home humanoid priced at $20,000 or by monthly subscription, with first deliveries planned for 2026.

Fourier is a Shanghai robotics company founded in 2015 by Gu Jie. It began with rehabilitation robots and exoskeletons, then released the GR-1, GR-2 and GR-3 full-size humanoid robots in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Apptronik is an Austin robotics company spun out of a University of Texas lab in 2016 that builds the Apollo humanoid robot and has signed commercial deals with Mercedes-Benz and GXO Logistics.

Boston Dynamics' 2016 generation of the Atlas humanoid, called Atlas HD or hydraulic Atlas: smaller, lighter and more agile than earlier versions, electrically powered and hydraulically actuated, and retired in 2024.

Optimus is Tesla's humanoid robot; its first prototype appeared at the company's second AI Day in September 2022, about 172 cm tall and 73 kg, with a 2.3 kWh battery pack and more than 200 degrees of freedom.

Phoenix is Sanctuary AI's sixth-generation humanoid general-purpose robot, unveiled in May 2023 and controlled by the company's Carbon AI system.

Unitree H1 is a full-size humanoid robot released by Unitree Robotics in August 2023. It stands about 180 cm tall, weighs about 47 kg, runs at up to 3.3 m/s and comes with a quick-swap battery pack.

AgiBot Yuanzheng A1 is a 175 cm, 55 kg humanoid robot unveiled by AgiBot on 18 August 2023, with 49 degrees of freedom, a 7 km/h walking speed, custom PowerFlow joint modules and the WorkGPT agent model as its software stack.

Apollo is Apptronik's humanoid robot, unveiled in August 2023: a 1.72 m electric machine with a 55-pound payload and swappable four-hour batteries, aimed first at warehouse and factory work.

Tesla's second-generation humanoid robot, shown in a December 2023 video walking, dancing and handling an egg, with 30% faster walking, 10 kg less weight and 11-DoF hands.[^1][^2]

NVIDIA's project for a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots, announced in March 2024 and followed in March 2025 by Isaac GR00T N1, an open, customizable model released with training data and evaluation scenarios.

A humanoid robot announced by Unitree Robotics on 13 May 2024 with a starting price of 99,000 yuan. The G1 weighs about 35 kg, folds for transport, and comes in a standard version and a configurable EDU version.

UBTECH Walker S1 is an industrial humanoid robot released on 14 October 2024. Standing 172 cm and weighing 76 kg, it can walk while carrying a 15 kg payload and has been trialled in BYD and Audi FAW car plants.

IRON is XPENG's humanoid robot, first shown in November 2024 and redesigned a year later. It borrows the chip, vision system and AI models XPENG developed for its cars, and was trialled on a car production line.

UBTECH's second-generation industrial humanoid robot, launched in 2025, features a three-minute self-swap battery system and entered mass production and delivery the same year.

Helix is Figure's vision-language-action model for humanoid control, pairing a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model with a fast 80-million-parameter action policy, trained on about 500 hours of teleoperated data and run entirely on onboard GPUs.

A general-purpose embodied foundation model released by AgiBot on 10 March 2025, built on a Vision-Language-Latent-Action architecture. In the company's tests across five tasks it raised average success rate from 46% to 78%.

Gemini Robotics is a vision-language-action model from Google DeepMind, built on Gemini 2.0, that outputs physical actions to control robots. It was announced on 12 March 2025 alongside Gemini Robotics-ER.

Tiangong Ultra is a 180 cm humanoid robot that won the 2025 Beijing Yizhuang humanoid half marathon, finishing 21.0975 km in 2 hours 40 minutes 42 seconds at an average of 7.88 km/h.

Unitree R1 is a small humanoid robot released by Unitree on 25 July 2025 at a starting price of 39,900 yuan, the company's third humanoid model and its lowest-priced one to date.

GR-3 is the third-generation robot in Fourier's GRx series and the company's first medical and elderly-care robot built around interactive companionship. It was shown at WAIC 2025 and launched in Beijing on 6 August 2025.

Unitree H2 is a bionic humanoid robot announced on 20 October 2025, with a face-like head, 31 degrees of freedom, a weight of about 70 kg and a list price of 199,000 yuan.

Boston Dynamics and Hyundai Motor Group unveiled a production-ready Atlas humanoid in January 2026, with deployments planned at Hyundai and Google DeepMind and a fleet trained using reinforcement learning and foundation models.

An open reasoning vision-language-action model from NVIDIA for humanoid robots, announced in March 2026 as commercially usable and trained on large public robot manipulation datasets.

NVIDIA previewed Isaac GR00T N2, a next-generation robot foundation model built on a world action model architecture that the company says more than doubles success on new tasks compared with leading VLA models.

Honda Motor Co., Ltd. is the company that built ASIMO, the humanoid robot it announced in Tokyo on 20 November 2000, following humanoid robotics research that began in 1986 and ran through a series of experimental walking machines.

Agility Robotics builds Digit, a bipedal mobile manipulation robot, and assembles it at its own factory in Salem, Oregon. The company has tested the robot with Amazon and deployed it with a logistics customer under a multi-year agreement.

Galbot G1 is a wheeled humanoid robot: 1,730 mm tall, 21 degrees of freedom, swappable hand, suction cup or gripper, an onboard NVIDIA AGX Orin computer, and, the company says, deployments in unmanned retail cabins at over 170 sites.

Chinese engineer and technology communicator who worked on AI chips and algorithms at Huawei and co-founded the robotics company AgiBot, where he is president and chief technology officer.

Bernt Øyvind Børnich is CEO of 1X Technologies, the robotics company he founded in 2014 as Halodi Robotics; its work spans humanoid robots and the Revo1 servo motor.

Digit is Agility Robotics' human-centric, multi-purpose robot for logistics work. It moves and handles totes in warehouses, including repetitive tote recycling for Amazon and conveyor feeding at a GXO facility.

Honda's P1 was the first humanoid in Honda's P series, built during 1993–1997 research. Standing 1,915 mm and weighing 175 kg, it combined bipedal legs with a torso and arms, running on external power and an external computer.

Honda's P3, completed in September 1997, is a completely independent bipedal humanoid walking robot, 1,600 mm tall and 130 kg; Honda later called ASIMO its further evolved version.

Sanctuary AI is a Vancouver-based robotics company founded in 2018 that aims to build human-like intelligence for general-purpose robots. Its humanoid robot Phoenix was named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2023 list, and the company reported its first commercial deployment that year.

CyberOne, nicknamed Tieda, is a full-size humanoid bionic robot that Xiaomi presented in August 2022. It showed the company assembling perception, control and actuation into one machine, but it had not entered mass production.

Galbot is a robotics company founded in 2023 that builds general-purpose robots around an embodied foundation model, with its AstraBrain model family, a large-scale data infrastructure and deployed robots in several industries.

The Fourier GR-1 is Fourier's first full-size humanoid robot, released in 2023 and mass-produced the same year. It is aimed at guided reception and consulting work and at academic research.

Fourier's second-generation general-purpose humanoid robot, released and put into mass production in 2024. It follows the GR-1 and is used for guided reception, consulting and academic research.

NEO Beta is a bipedal humanoid prototype that 1X unveiled on 30 August 2024 for home use. The company presented it as a step from concept development toward limited in-home testing and production planning.

NEO Gamma is 1X's home humanoid robot, introduced in February 2025 with a learned whole-body controller that gives it a human-like gait; it was used for early household testing before the company's NEO robot succeeded it.

Galbot S1 is a heavy-load embodied robot for industrial, warehousing and logistics work, with two arms carrying up to 50 kg, a reach from the floor to 2.3 m shelves, and hot-swappable batteries for round-the-clock operation.