This is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time.
Humanoid robots barely progressed between 2000-2020. There have obviously been incremental improvements in things like dexterity, vision, self-balancing, and locomotion, but in terms of having a useful humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO released in the year 2000 is not crazily behind what we had in 2020. So it's not surprise we haven't seen economic dividends yet in the real world.
I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years.
I think they mostly tried to go down this path before we had the transformer. With VLA models, or really now "Large Behavior Models", what's possible has changed dramatically. I've seen robot arms fold laundry now. Textile work is insanely hard, now it's just putting a lot of learned behavior together.
The current humanoid hype don't have much substances or key technologies in it, and incumbent industrial robotics companies like FANUC are already in the process of rolling the techniques created for humanoids into their robots. I personally think this is going to be just series of incremental gains for big welding bots, and nursery equipment becoming mildly robotic, like Aperture Science wall panels, than humanoids walking into retirement homes and doing dishes in the future.
Those were never techniques created for humanoid robots. Google researched using transformers as vision language action models to drive robots back in 2023 on a mobile manipulator and probably did non VLA work even earlier.
This is something people refuse to understand. The shape of the robot changes absolutely nothing about robot intelligence unless it abandons the basic concept of joints and links. Continuum robots are very difficult to control but they are also incredibly niche.
I really can't shrug off my suspicion since one of Chinese humanoid startups had added few female type body bumps on a robot and the online humanoid hype cluster("but does it do laundry or dishes" types) responded in panic with shared sentiments of defeat, that, those humanoid hype types might be just yearning for HBO Westworld bots, to state it with modesty, not even Data or Marvin who we can share drinks with. The absolute humanoid obsession doesn't make sense to me otherwise. The cookie cutter "humanoids are best poised for leveraging pre-existing human infra" response make close to zero sense otherwise.
I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years.