Humanoid robots finally get real jobs

While their jobs may be straightforward and menial, these “Digit" robots are a direct replacement for the humans who would otherwise be doing this work. They are also a flexible bridge between the other less versatile automated machines common in warehouses and factories. In this way, a humanoid robot like Digit represents the next step—in an evolution that stretches back to the invention of the assembly line—in the speedup and automation of processes essential to e-commerce, manufacturing, agriculture and every other part of our physical and built environment.

Science fiction has long been full of robots that look, move and even think like we do. In the real world humanoid forms have, until very recently, been a nonstarter. Hard to build, expensive, slow and lumbering, they have never made sense compared with the countless other varieties of purpose-built—and vastly more affordable—robots that have multiplied rapidly in the past decade.

That’s changing. As global demand for new kinds of robots has shot up, mass manufacturing and falling costs for components are making them cheaper to produce. Just as important, new kinds of AI—some close kin to the kind that has upended the priorities of tech companies and governments since the debut of ChatGPT—are animating robot bodies in ways that simply weren’t possible even a few years ago.

While purpose-built robots continue to proliferate, be they wheeled conveyances or dog-shaped machines carrying guns, the advantages of a body plan like ours are beginning to carve out a niche for humanoid robots. The world, after all, is built for things that look and move like we do. It’s full of stairs, gangways, shelves at shoulder height and sightlines at eye level, so hewing to the humanoid form makes it easier to slot robots into existing roles. Then there are the more subtle advantages of the human form—we can pick up heavy loads by cantilevering them over bent legs. By contrast, a robot with wheels and arms would have to have a much wider and heavier base to keep from tipping over.

More than a dozen startups worldwide are now offering humanoid robots. All have grand projections of a science-fiction future of limitless human assistance from our mechanical serfs; several already have their bots undergoing testing in real-world factories and warehouses.

A key advantage that makers tout: Unlike most current automation, humanoid robots can do more than one thing.

“Humanoid robots are the first category of robots that can be doing completely different tasks based on the needs of the business or the time of the shift," says Adrian Stoch, chief automation officer of GXO Logistics, which owns and operates the distribution center for Spanx where Agility’s Digit robots now roam. “In the future, we could have Digit unloading a trailer in the morning, picking goods in the afternoon, and loading trucks in the evening."

For makers of next-generation humanoid robots, the reasoning goes, their potential flexibility helps justify their cost by making them usable for more hours out of every year. None of the companies that offer humanoid robots currently discloses their cost; all will say that over time the cost will fall, and that this will be key to their adoption.

“The challenge for robotics has always been the economics," says Jeff Cardenas, chief executive of Austin, Texas-based Apptronik, which is starting trials with its own humanoid robots at a different GXO warehouse. That’s why his company, since its spinout from a University of Texas robotics lab nearly a decade ago, has been working on making robots as affordable as possible.

But even the most inexpensive and reliable robot body is nothing without a brain.

This is where some of the world’s most valuable companies, and some of the best-known startups, come into the picture, including chip maker Nvidia and ChatGPT developer OpenAI. Many of their biggest bets—on multibillion-dollar data centers and on multimillion-dollar salaries for star engineers—are at least in part about robotics.

“We believe the enabling technology for autonomous robots is the same technology that’s behind all the things we’re doing with AI and with large language models," says Rev Lebaredian, head of Nvidia’s efforts to enable simulation of real-world environments, a key to building robot brains.

Some believe that just as chatbots are soon to attain a level of ability that could allow them to perform tasks with little or no human supervision, robots will be next.

“The ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner," Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang recently said in a speech at an electronics trade show.

Already, the latest wave of artificial-intelligence tech—both hardware and software—is enabling robots, and in particular humanoid robots, to behave in ways that were beyond the state of the art even a few years ago. “We have evolved such that the robot brains are much more powerful—that I’m extremely confident about," says Ayanna Howard, a roboticist who has been working on humanoid robots for decades, and dean of the college of engineering at Ohio State University.

Boston Dynamics, a company famous for filling the internet with videos of increasingly capable robots for more than 20 years, embodies this trend.

When Boston Dynamics was spun out from MIT in 1992, control systems for robots—in other words, their brains—were primeval by today’s standards. Since then, AI, which essentially is about teaching computers rather than programming them, has been steadily introduced into more and more parts of the software that directs the Boston Dynamics robots, says Aaron Saunders, chief technology officer of the company.

Robotics is a field in which seeing is believing. The success or failure of its creations is easy for anyone to evaluate. In that spirit, Melonee Wise, chief technology officer of Agility, is quick to point out that her company was the first in the U.S. to have humanoid robots doing real work in an actual production environment.

Yet, whatever the pace of the takeover of manual labor by humanoid robots, their capabilities are for now quite limited—as are their number. Inside the Spanx warehouse, there are still just two Digit robots on staff, says Stoch of GXO. For robots to really rise in his industry, in which thousands of subtasks still need to be automated, many different kinds of humanoid robots may be required, he adds.

Howard of Ohio State, who has more experience working with humanoid robots than almost anyone, agrees that the future is likely to be an ever-growing bestiary of robot body types, no matter how smart they become. And Cardenas of Apptronik believes that the most versatile robots will be torsos with arms and heads that can be placed on top of almost any platform—from wheels to four legs. The future of general-purpose robots, in other words, might be humanoid only in the sense that we’ll expect them to think like us—whatever their body plan.

Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com