Humanoid robots are here, but they’re a little awkward. Do we really need them?

Building a robot that’s both human-like and useful is a decades-old engineering dream inspired by popular science fiction. “The intention is not to start from the beginning and say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to make a robot look like a person,’” said Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. “We’re trying to make robots that can operate in human spaces.” Do we even need humanoids? “The hardest problem is the problem of understanding the world and being able to manipulate it with your hands.” Sanctuary’s newest and first bipedal robot, Phoenix, can stock shelves, unload delivery vehicles and operate a checkout, early steps toward what Rose sees as a much longer-term goal of getting robots to perceive the physical world to be able to reason about it in a way that resembles intelligence. But what I mean more specifically is the systems have to be able to understand speech and they need to be able to convert the understanding of speech into action, which will satisfy job roles across the entire economy.” Agility’s Digit robot caught Amazon’s attention because it can walk and also move around in a way that could complement the e-commerce giant’s existing fleet of vehicle-like robots that move large carts around its vast warehouses.