Humanoid Robots Show Persistently Lower Productivity In Practice

Recent industry research and academic studies report that humanoid robots underperform in real-world settings, operating at less than half the efficiency of human workers in early deployments. Problems stem from physical execution—vision, grasping, locomotion—and the costs of supervision, resets and recalibration. The findings suggest firms achieve measurable productivity only in structured, repetitive tasks such as warehousing, while general-purpose replacement remains a longer-term prospect.