Humanoid robot makers announce fresh breakthroughs as competition heats up

Three of the biggest names in humanoid robotics have announced milestone achievements within days of each other. 

Figure’s software reported that it completed tasks in 30 homes it had never seen, while Boston Dynamics opened an Atlas training center inside a Hyundai plant in Georgia, and Unitree put a 22-joint robotic hand on sale for $6,500. 

Can humanoid robots be used reliably in real life settings? 

Figure AI has reported that it took its Figure 03 robot, which is 173 cm tall and weighs 61 kilograms, into 30 Bay Area homes and asked it to complete simple tasks like tidying living rooms, folding towels, and making beds. 

Across 420 attempts, the robot finished the task successfully 56% of the time despite not having any data collected in those homes or receiving any tuning on arrival. 

Figure ran the same test with an identical model that had not been trained on the company’s Index dataset, and it only managed to succeed 9% of the time.  

Figure says the Index, which is a crowdsourced library of human-behavior videos, now grows by about 35 minutes of footage every second, roughly 5.7 years of human activity a day.

On the same day, Boston Dynamics opened its Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group’s Metaplant America outside Savannah, Georgia. Atlas humanoids will be working inside the car plant, learning to sort and sequence automotive parts before those parts reach assembly. 

Zack Jackowski, chief product and technology officer at Boston Dynamics, described the center as a “Robot Behavior Factory” that feeds Atlas high-quality training data. The robots aren’t expected to tackle component assembly until 2030.

Hyundai said that it intends to roll out 25,000 Atlas units across its and Kia’s plants over the next few years, and to build a U.S. factory able to make up to 30,000 robots annually by 2028. The center itself is set to grow roughly tenfold when operations move to a new building next year.

Notably, Cryptopolitan recently reported that a senior Hyundai official ruled out a Boston Dynamics IPO in 2027, due to a 528.4 billion won loss in 2025 and no large-scale Atlas deployment. Analysts are projecting that any listing will likely be in 2029 or 2030. 

Unitree launches a robotic hand 

Unitree has introduced the Dex5-S, a dexterous hand with 22 degrees of freedom sized to match a real human hand, starting at $6,500 before tax and shipping. Unitree said on X that every joint supports backdrivability, a feature that lets the hand yield to external force rather than fight it.

Chinese manufacturers made up over 97% of all humanoid robots shipped worldwide, which amounts to about 19,100 units total. 

AgiBot reportedly overtook Unitree as the world’s largest humanoid vendor in the first half of 2026, shipping about 8,400 units for 44% of the global market on a 562% jump year over year. Unitree slipped to second at roughly 5,900 units and 31%, with its volume concentrated in the G1 model.

Together, AgiBot and Unitree account for roughly 75% of all humanoid robots shipped globally. The remaining 25% is split among a smaller number of Chinese firms and a handful of American competitors, including Tesla, Figure AI, and Agility Robotics. 

Figure has committed $3.5 billion of compute through a partnership with Nscale, with room to scale past $6 billion, in order to keep training its Helix software.

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