r/Humanoids

DR02 humanoid tackles outdoor stairs, highlighting its dynamic mobility and rugged capabilities in challenging environments.

Deep Robotics has released new footage showing its DR02 humanoid robot climbing outdoor concrete stairs, highlighting the machine’s ability to handle challenging terrain and maintain dynamic movement.

Chinese humanoid robot makers accounted for over 97% of global shipments in 1H26, as volumes more than tripled to 19,100 units.

Shanghai-based Agibot led with 44% of global shipments (8,400 units), overtaking Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics.

Industrial and commercial sectors accounted for more than 70% of total deployments, a sharp rise from roughly 50% a year prior.

Annual shipments are projected to hit 60,000 units by the end of 2026

I've been thinking about all the talk about humanoid robots lately. The idea seems to be that eventually we'll have them at home doing laundry, loading the dishwasher, cleaning, moving things around, etc.

But why humanoid?

I think the answer is pretty obvious: because everything around us was built for humans. Doors, stairs, washing machines, buttons, shelves, tools... If you want a robot to work in an existing house, making it roughly human-shaped makes perfect sense.

But is that really the long-term future, or just a transition?

Look at self-driving cars. We aren't building humanoid robots that sit in the driver's seat, turn the steering wheel and press the pedals. We're making the car itself intelligent. And if autonomous cars eventually become the majority, I would expect some of the road infrastructure to change around them too.

Why wouldn't houses evolve the same way?

Take laundry. Instead of a humanoid robot walking around collecting clothes and operating a washer designed for humans, a future house could have a built-in system: drop clothes somewhere, they get transported, identified/sorted, washed, dried, maybe folded, and returned to some kind of automated closet system. At that point the "washing machine" doesn't even need a door or buttons accessible to a person.

Same with deliveries. Amazon uses trucks going house to house because that's how our cities work today. But a neighborhood designed from scratch could theoretically have an underground/covered automated package network connecting a distribution point directly to homes.

Obviously rebuilding infrastructure is much harder than building a robot that can use what already exists. That's exactly why I think humanoid robots make sense in the near future.

I'm just not convinced they're the end state.

Maybe we're currently trying to build robots that can operate in a world designed for humans, while the bigger change eventually comes from redesigning the parts of that world that don't actually need to be human-oriented.

50–100 years from now, will we really have humanoid robots walking around pressing buttons on appliances?

Or will that seem as strange as building a robot today to sit in the driver's seat of a self-driving car?

At CES 2025 in Las Vegas, in the same hall as Atlas, Optimus, and Figure 02, there was a Realbotix unit on display. Everything else in that room was pitching warehouse logistics, manufacturing assembly, and eventually folding your laundry. Realbotix was pitching conversation.

The company got there by one of the stranger corporate paths in robotics.

The genealogy

It starts with Matt McMullen, who trained in Hollywood special-effects fabrication and founded Abyss Creations in San Marcos, California in 1996 to make hyper-realistic silicone mannequins. Customer demand pushed the product line somewhere he hadn't planned, and by the mid-2010s Abyss had shipped four to five thousand units at $6,000 to $15,000 apiece and had become the most identifiable name in its category. The 2007 Ryan Gosling film Lars and the Real Girl was, in attention terms, the moment the product entered general awareness.

In 2016 McMullen decided the next step was animatronics and conversational AI, spun up a sister company called Realbotix, and staffed it with engineers poached from Hanson Robotics — the Hong Kong outfit behind Sophia, the platform Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to in 2017. The Harmony app launched on Android in April 2017 at $30 a year. The first robotic head shipped late that year at around $10,000.

Then in July 2024 a Toronto investor named Andrew Kiguel — previously chief executive of a publicly traded cryptocurrency holding company called Tokens.com — bought Abyss Creations outright and reverse-merged it into a public shell. The twenty-eight-year-old founder-led silicone manufacturer became Realbotix Corp, ticker XBOTF, with an "embodied AI" thesis and quarterly filings.

The product

The current platform is an animatronic head module mated to a customised silicone body, $8,000 to $20,000 depending on configuration, running the Harmony AI app with persistent memory of your stated preferences.

The feature that separates it from everything else in robotics is magnetic face-swap. The face detaches. You can click on a different one — Harmony, Solana, several others released since — on the same head and the same body. No other robotics company ships a product where the head is a platform and the face is a peripheral.

There's a male variant called Henry: six feet, eighty-four pounds, eleven thousand dollars and up, British accent in the default voice configuration. Commercial footprint substantially smaller than the female-form line, which is the kind of sentence that appears in an annual report now.

The pivot nobody expected

The parent holding entity, Simulacra Corporation, runs three subsidiaries. Abyss Creations does the silicone. Realbotix does the AI and animatronics. And Anthropomorphic Figure Dynamics does medical simulation and military training under contracts with Johns Hopkins Hospital and Department of Defense clients.

Same hardware substrate. Same hyper-realistic silicone bodies, same animatronic faces, same manufacturing line in San Marcos. Different invoice header. A surgical resident practising on an AFD training model is practising on the descendant of a Hollywood special-effects mannequin that took a thirty-year detour, and the engineering that makes a face convincing in one market makes it convincing in the other.

It is a legitimately good business pivot and it should not be as funny as it is.

Everyone else said not it

Here's the genuinely unusual industrial fact. Every commercial robotics vertical has multiple serious players fighting for share — warehouse, inspection, agriculture, eldercare, defense, disaster response. Except this one.

Boston Dynamics, Agility, Apptronik, Figure, 1X, and Tesla have all publicly committed to staying out. Several have gone further and built hardware constraints into their platforms — articulation limits, materials choices — that make repurposing structurally awkward rather than merely against policy.

None of them are constrained technically. Any of them could enter with modest engineering changes and would immediately be the largest player in the category. They've collectively decided the brand risk exceeds the revenue and left the entire market to a handful of specialists.

An entire industry looking at a profitable adjacent market and unanimously deciding to leave it alone doesn't have an obvious parallel anywhere else in tech.

The robots are the small part

Combined global installed base of dedicated companion robots — Realbotix plus EXDOLL in Dalian plus DS Doll plus AI-Tech's Emma line in the UK plus Synthea Amatus in Barcelona — is, by every available estimate, in the low five figures of units shipped. Total. Ever. Tens of millions of dollars in an industry where humanoid robotics carries north of $50 billion in venture valuation.

Meanwhile the software side has Replika at roughly 30 million accumulated accounts, Character.AI past 20 million, and a long tail of dedicated apps generating north of $200 million a year in subscriptions. Replika's most-discussed moment came in February 2023 when Luka Inc. pulled a paid feature that 500,000+ subscribers had specifically signed up for, generating the kind of user revolt that gets its own subreddit nickname and, seven weeks later, a partial reversal for legacy accounts.

Three orders of magnitude more users on the software side. The hardware is the part that gets written about and the part that barely exists.

Japan built a coffee maker

The Japanese version of this category skipped the robot entirely. Gatebox, launched by Tokyo's Vinclu in 2016, is a tabletop device roughly the size of a drip coffee maker with a transparent display column projecting a holographic-effect anime character — usually the default Hikari Azuma, voiced by professional voice actress Saori Goto. It responds to spoken Japanese, texts you during the day, and turns the lights on when you get home.

The company has issued more than 4,000 "marriage certificates" through its internal registry. Japanese civil law recognises exactly none of them, which Gatebox is fully aware of and has never claimed otherwise. It's a ceremonial feature in a consumer product, and four thousand people used it.

No actuators. No servos. No silicone. A display column and a conversational model, outselling the entire physical robot category several times over.

Underneath, it's the same parts bin

The supply chain is unremarkable, which is its own kind of interesting. Same semiconductors as every other robot. Same lithium-ion chemistry. Same rare-earth permanent magnets in the small servos — the neodymium and dysprosium bottleneck that constrains every actuator on earth applies here identically. The only distinctive input is platinum-cure medical-grade silicone, sourced from a handful of specialty chemical suppliers in California, Japan, and Germany that mostly serve the entertainment special-effects industry McMullen came out of in the first place.

Full write-up on the Realbotix corporate history, the Harmony platform, Gatebox, and the non-entry pledge:

https://unteachablecourses.com/romance-companionship-sex-robotics-2026/

The question I keep coming back to is the pledge, because it has the same shape as the weaponisation letter those same companies signed in 2022 — voluntary, non-binding, and already under pressure from Ghost Robotics happily filling the gap Boston Dynamics left. Voluntary abstention holds while a market is small and the reputational math is obvious. Both of those are variables. I can't find a case anywhere in tech where an entire industry's collective decision to skip a profitable adjacent market survived a decade of a specialist proving it out — has anyone got one?