Humanoid Robots in Manufacturing

Humanoid robots are having a moment. Companies like Unitree Robotics, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and many others are putting out awesome videos of robots doing everything from backflips to kip ups. First, let’s put aside the fact that we have seen awesome humanoid robot demo videos for almost a decade without many humanoid robots out in the world and we should be default skeptical of robots operated by the people who built them. But, let’s assume that this time is different and functional humanoid robots are right around the corner. In this scenario, many people have pointed at manufacturing as the place they will first revolutionize. I wanted to dig in and see whether that’s feasible.

I want to caveat up front that this analysis is only about humanoid robots in manufacturing. There are many situations where you’re neither optimizing for efficiency nor able to reconfigure environments easily where humanoid robots might have a big impact: these are your janitors, housekeepers, and gardeners. Those environments are incredibly unstructured, so people often point to manufacturing, which involves more repetitive work and structured environments, as the first useful application for humanoid robots.

When people imagine humanoid robots, they’re usually assuming that they can do basically anything a person can do. While I do want to flag how hard that will be to achieve, I think the more interesting question is “in a world where AI is good enough to enable human-parity humanoid robots, what other manufacturing paradigms would be unlocked? How do they compare to just dropping humanoid robots where we have people right now?”

We could break these big questions down into three, slightly more tractable, ones:

1. What does it take for a humanoid robot to be at cost parity with a person?

2. What role do people actually do in the manufacturing process? What will automating that do to the speed and price of manufactured goods?

3. How do humanoid robots compare to other, more specialized forms of automation?

This piece does a rough numerical analysis on cost and then some more qualitative analysis on the latter two questions.

Spoiler alert: My hypothesis is that in a world where there is good enough software and hardware to create humanoid robots that are as good and flexible as a human at manufacturing tasks, we will also be able to quickly create more task-specific hardware or use less complex hardware ...