Automation Humanoid Robots: The First Steps in the Factory

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Humanoid robots are rare in manufacturing—but they have made this step. The AI models are constantly learning. However, industrial reliability is often still lacking.

These dancing robots everywhere! The humanoids, the bipeds among the machines for automated actions, are currently conquering the media. And the social networks. Compared to this general interest, the statistics seem like a mistake: just 13,317 humanoid robots were delivered worldwide in 2025, according to a report by the British market research agency Omdia.

In China, many people are starting to get too much of the current hype. "We don't need a million dancing humanoid robots," was the headline of the Tencent Tech portal a few days ago.

Most of the humanoids actually sold currently come from China. Zhiyuan Robot delivered 5,168 units of its "AgiBot" to customers last year, Unitree Robotics 4,200 units and Ubtech around 1,000 units, Tencent Tech quotes from the Omdia report. Experts warn that the industry is so young that the statistics are still relatively immature. Some figures may include orders that will only be fulfilled in the coming years. Elsewhere, deliveries may not be recorded.

Humanoid Robots: Hype Versus Reality

Be that as it may, the reality is that "most companies have yet to deliver relevant production capacity for humanoid robots", comments the Chinese technology portal. This is particularly true if you compare the figures for humanoids with those for industrial robots. These are cobots and all the models that work in factories around the world instead of dancing on TV or shining with flip-flops on TikTok.

Complete figures for 2025 are not yet available, but the International Federation of Robotics in Frankfurt predicts that around 575,000 industrial robots will be installed worldwide last year. So is it all just hype with the humanoids? Not that either. But individual company founders have made public statements that have fueled expectations regarding the arrival of humanoids in everyday life.

Scaling Humanoids Commercially

Elon Musk said in an interview last May that he wanted to produce "one million" of his Optimus robots within the next five years. According to Omdia, his company delivered 150 units last year. Nevertheless, deliveries of humanoids worldwide have risen sharply within a year, from only around 2,000 units in 2024. And from now on, commercial scaling is expected to increase rapidly according to many observers.

Positive Forecasts for Humanoid Robots

At the end of January 2026, the investment bank Morgan Stanley doubled its previous forecast for global sales of humanoids for the current year from 14,000 to 28,000. Omdia predicts that around 2.6 million humanoids will be sold annually in 2035.

A fair analysis is therefore that the humanoid industry is still in its infancy, but has great potential for growth. It was similar with electric cars at the very beginning. Sales grew from a few thousand a year to hundreds of thousands and then millions.

Hardware and Software Still Unreliable

The reason why more dancing is currently being done and fewer dishwashers are being emptied or electric cars assembled is due to the fact that the hardware is not yet fully developed and the intelligence is still inadequate. The large AI models still have a lot to learn.

After Wang Zhongyuan from the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence bought ten humanoid robots for his team of researchers, five of them were broken again after two months. "The hardware stability is still at the research stage," Wang told Tencent Tech. Because the robot arms often overheated quickly, he had to buy them fans, "like assigning them a babysitter."

Other observers believe that the "intelligence" of humanoids also still has a long learning curve ahead of it. Making a robot dance for a few minutes or having it perform complex tasks on an assembly line for several hours is a different matter. However, there are also initial breakthroughs in this area.

Humanoid Robots are Already Working Here

The Chinese battery manufacturer CATL started using some humanoids of the "Little Mo" brand, Xiaomo, in its battery factory in Zhongzhou in Henan province in December. They are testing battery packs there with so-called end-of-line or EOL tests and DCR measurements, which are sometimes fatal for human workers because they can cause electric shocks.

Elsewhere, humanoids are appearing in Midea's first washing machine factories in central China or on the production lines of electric car manufacturers in southern China. Small series are still being incorporated everywhere. But with every gigabyte of "experience" they store, the vertical AI models get better.

Xiaomi Plans Many Humanoids in Production

The founder of smartphone and e-car manufacturer Xiaomi, Lei Jun, has said that he wants to start the "large-scale use of humanoids" in his factories within the next five years. Alongside the use of artificial intelligence and automation, they will take over tasks in the Group's modern AI factories that are currently still carried out by skilled workers.

Even the current pilot deployments of humanoids in factories have led some observers in China to conclude that all the dancing around on social media is obscuring the view of a much more important paradigm shift: humanoids, they argue, are just making the leap into the "world of real work".

From Demo Object to Tool

"In 2025, China's robotics industry reached a historic turning point," writes the Chinese journal Kechuangban Ribao. Humanoids have gone from being "demonstration objects in the laboratory" to tools that take part in factory production. The paper believes that the new technology of humanoid robots is currently undergoing its validation phase with its first industrial applications.

The sums flowing into robotics start-ups on the "STAR Market", the Chinese equivalent of the NASDAQ, in Shanghai are correspondingly large. This means that humanoids may still be dancing around like happy children in China and elsewhere, but the serious side of life is already catching up with them. (thg)

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