2025 Is the Year of the Humanoid Robot Factory Worker

Later this year, Boston Dynamics Plans to spend their purely electrical humanoid atlas robots into a Hyundai factory. The new version of the bot developed from the hydraulics Atlas The model, which has been carried out by Viral Videodemos since 2013, made its public debut last spring. While the dog-like location and the company’s warehouse robot are already being used in industrial areas, the Hyundai pilot is used for the first time in commercial production.

Boston Dynamics that was acquired by Hyundai For 1.1 billion US dollars in 2021, it is Coy how the robot is used, but the general idea is that it is stronger and more reliable than a human worker. “The robot will be able to do things that are difficult for people,” says Kerri Neelon, spokesman for Boston Dynamics. “They absorb very heavy objects and wear things that are uncomfortable for humans to wear them.”

Atlas will have friends: 2025 seems to be the year in which humanoid robots, which are previously largely limited to research laboratories, are commercial. Some have already undertaken their first preliminary robot steps in paid work with Agility Robotics’ digits Moving objects in a warehouse and figure of the same name two companies Shipping to commercial customers last year.

Tech giants also stand in the trend: both Apple And Meta It is rumored that they work on a kind of humanoid robot with consumers. A 2024 Goldman Sachs report It is estimated that Humanoid robots will represent a market for 38 billion US dollars by 2035 – more than six times the company that the company projected a year earlier.

The basic promise of humanoic robots is that you can switch between several tasks like your human colleagues. It is a fundamentally different approach than the traditional automation of the assembly line, which builds an entire environment around the specific tasks for the production. Jonathan Hurst, co -founder and Chief Robot Officer at Agility Robotics, expects his robots to sit next to this process and do not disturb him.

“A specially built automation solution will be ever higher performance and lower costs for this purpose,” says Hurst. “It’s great if you have 24/7 operations for the specific thing you want to do.” A flexible robot could be more productive for tasks that do not have to run around the clock.

Boston Dynamics does it differently. With factories that are already a safe place for automation, the Atlas company has built with a view of a robot that could go anywhere else. “We live in a human world,” says Neelon, “so we should build a robot that reflects it.”

But there are challenges to bring humanoid robots onto the market. The Optimus of Tesla has been strongly expected since the company’s first announcement in 2021, but a demo in October recorded concerns when the robots exhibited were known to be controlled by humans, which raises questions about the extent to which Optimus could work autonomously. In JanuaryMusk said told investor Production could be influenced by the restrictions on rare earth exports China implemented In response to President Donald Trumps Tariff.