[93po]

I think the use case here is smaller to medium size businesses that don't need a $150k suction robot arm 24/7, but do need 24/7 help with warehousing, packaging, restocking, taking inventory, sorting mailing, applying shipping labes, etc. With a single humanoid robot you can do all that for, at some point, possibly as low as $20k for a one-time robot purchase.

[spopejoy]

We're so far from that though. Even if we magically jump over the failure rates we're discussing here, the safety considerations seem to be far worse. These things are heavy and dangerous, c.f. Rodney Brooks' "never follow a robot up stairs" https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/why-irobots-founder-wont-...

[blackguardx]

Why do you think a humanoid robot will be cheaper than a robot arm?

[xky]

If humanoid robots can perform ok on a broader set of tasks then they could reach economies of scale that a robot arm might not.

[aerostable_slug]

To add to that, a good friend of mine is a welder and machinist (and still using Linux on the desktop years after I set him up). A robot 'helper' that just moves things around and maybe does basic machine work (cutting pipe and threading the ends, for example) would put his productivity through the roof. Same story with a guy who specializes in kitchen remodeling.

It's hard to find decent general purpose help these days and they would pay good money for a halfway useful helper.

Once it's able to weld... That's going to be a massive game changer, and I can see that coming 'round the corner right quickly.

[sneak]

Once it’s able to weld and climb then building skyscrapers will become a lot easier and cheaper as you don’t need safety equipment for them.

[darkwater]

Yeah, just let them fall on top on someone/something below!

[numpad0]

There are couple UR5 single arm cobots on eBay at $5.5k each right at this moment. The truth is that the value of humanoid is in it form, the novelty, the sense of accomplishment, not features.

[metal_am]

If you found one for that price with the controller and pendent, please send me a link. I’ve looked a lot and have not seen any UR for remotely that cheap.

[93po]

because they already are. an industrial arm from ABB is frequently over $100k. add in the cost to fit it with specialty equipment like vacuum suction for handling boxes, made by a small to medium size business, they'd probably charge another $50k. and if it breaks you need specialty mechanics and parts.

in a world with 500 million humanoid robots, parts are plentiful, theyre easier to work on due to not weighing 5000 pounds, and like the other person said, economies of scale

[kevin_thibedeau]

> one-time robot purchase.

With a hefty subscription to make it do anything useful.

[timschmidt]

I can already run the Qwen3 VL multimodal model for text, image processing, and speech recognition and generation on a well spec'd home workstation.

And the Unitree R1 already only costs $6k.

All the necessary pieces are aligning, very rapidly, and as James Burke has pointed out, that's when Connections happen.

[serf]

the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy. it's like positing about the future of robotics by looking at a sumo bot.

what it IS , however, is a remarkable achievement of commoditization; getting a toy like that with those kind of motors would have been prohibitively expensive anywhere else in the world; but much like the Chinese 20k EV, it's not really a reliable marker for the actual future; in fact bottomed out pricing is more-so an indicator of the phase of industrialization that country is in.

[timschmidt]

> the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy

Only because it's not yet attached to a reasonable AI, which is my point. It's not going to do any heavy lifting, but it could easily do basic house chores like cleaning up, folding laundry, etc if it were. The actuators and body platform are there, and economies of scale already at work.

I guess some folks just can't or won't put 2 and 2 together to predict the near future.

[bchasknga]

Your reasonable AI cannot resolve the fact that its arm can only lift 2KG.

I am impressed by Unitree, but the problem that needs to be solved here is not just better software. Better hardware needs to come down in cost and weight to make the generalized robot argument more convincing.

There is still a long way to go for a humanoid to be a reasonable product, and that's not just a software issue.

[timschmidt]

> its arm can only lift 2KG

That covers more than 90% of the objects in my home, and most people's.

> the problem that needs to be solved here is not just better software. Better hardware needs to come down in cost and weight

I disagree. Software seems to be the main limitation to me at the moment. Bigger motors and batteries are readily available on the market already. Software is advancing rapidly, and seems to me will quickly be up to the task (i.e. within a few years), but at the moment is still the domain of research projects.

> There is still a long way to go for a humanoid to be a reasonable product

Whether or not you think it's a reasonable product, it's clearly already an available one which is already selling in volume. As with all things, future versions will be more capable.

[aDyslecticCrow]

Why are you comparing LLMs with robotics? What makes you think they are even remotely related problem sets?

[phs318u]

With humans, we call that subscription a salary.