Three of the biggest players in humanoid robotics announced major milestones within days of one another.
Figure said its software successfully completed tasks in 30 homes it had never encountered before, while Boston Dynamics launched an Atlas training center inside a Hyundai plant in Georgia, and Unitree began selling a 22-joint robotic hand for $6,500.
Can humanoid robots be deployed reliably in real-world environments?
Figure AI said it brought its Figure 03 robot, which stands 173 cm tall and weighs 61 kilograms, into 30 homes in the Bay Area and assigned it basic household jobs such as tidying living rooms, folding towels, and making beds.
Over 420 attempts, the robot completed the assigned task successfully 56% of the time, even though no data had been collected from those homes beforehand and the robot received no tuning after arrival.
Figure also conducted the same test using an identical model that had not been trained on the company’s Index dataset, and that version succeeded only 9% of the time.
According to Figure, Index — a crowdsourced library of videos showing human behavior — is now expanding by around 35 minutes of footage every second, equivalent to about 5.7 years of human activity per day.
That same day, Boston Dynamics opened its Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group’s Metaplant America near Savannah, Georgia. Atlas humanoid robots will operate inside the vehicle factory, where they will learn how to sort and sequence automotive parts before those components reach final assembly.
Zack Jackowski, chief product and technology officer at Boston Dynamics, called the facility a “Robot Behavior Factory” designed to supply Atlas with high-quality training data. The company does not expect the robots to take on component assembly work until 2030.
Hyundai said it plans to deploy 25,000 Atlas units across Hyundai and Kia factories over the next few years, while also building a U.S. plant capable of producing as many as 30,000 robots per year by 2028. The training center itself is expected to expand by roughly tenfold when operations move into a new building next year.
A recent report also noted that a senior Hyundai official ruled out a Boston Dynamics IPO in 2027 because of a 528.4 billion won loss in 2025 and the absence of large-scale Atlas deployment. Analysts now expect any public listing would more likely come in 2029 or 2030.
Unitree launches a robotic hand
Unitree has introduced the Dex5-S, a dexterous robotic hand with 22 degrees of freedom and dimensions intended to match a real human hand, with pricing starting at $6,500 before tax and shipping. Unitree said every joint supports backdrivability, meaning the hand can give way to external force instead of resisting it.
Chinese manufacturers accounted for more than 97% of all humanoid robots shipped worldwide, representing about 19,100 units in total.
AgiBot reportedly surpassed Unitree as the world’s largest humanoid robot vendor in the first half of 2026, shipping about 8,400 units and capturing 44% of the global market after a 562% year-over-year increase. Unitree fell to second place with roughly 5,900 units and a 31% share, with most of its volume centered on the G1 model.
Together, AgiBot and Unitree represent about 75% of all humanoid robot shipments worldwide. The other 25% is divided among a smaller group of Chinese companies and several American rivals, including Tesla, Figure AI, and Agility Robotics.
Figure has committed $3.5 billion in compute through a partnership with Nscale, with the ability to scale beyond $6 billion, as it continues training its Helix software.
Contact to : xlf550402@gmail.com
Copyright © boyuanhulian 2020 - 2023. All Right Reserved.