Humanoid Robots Advance with 'Too Human' Interactions
A recent analysis highlights major advances in humanoid robotics in 2026, with robots from companies like Figure demonstrating increasingly fluid conversational skills and context-aware responses. The progress is largely attributed to the application of large foundation models, which enable robots to generalize from verbal commands and perform tasks without explicit programming.
- Figure AI's valuation surged to $39 billion after a Series C funding round in September 2025 that raised over $1 billion from investors including NVIDIA, Intel, and Qualcomm. This followed a $675 million Series B in February 2024, which included funding from Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, and OpenAI. - The company established a partnership with OpenAI in February 2024 to develop specialized AI models for its robots, leveraging OpenAI's research to accelerate its commercial timeline. However, in early 2025, Figure ended the collaboration to focus on its own vertically integrated AI platform, named Helix. - Figure's initial humanoid model, Figure 01, stands 5'6" tall, weighs 60 kg, can carry a 20 kg payload, and has a battery runtime of five hours. Its successor, Figure 02, features more advanced hands with 16 degrees of freedom and is powered by the proprietary Helix AI system. - The integration of vision-language models (VLMs) allows these robots to perform high-level perception and planning. This enables them to understand spoken commands, visually recognize objects, and reason through multi-step tasks without task-specific programming. - In a key commercial deployment, Figure partnered with BMW in January 2024 to use its humanoid robots for automotive manufacturing tasks at a plant in South Carolina. - To meet growing demand, Figure AI launched BotQ in March 2025, a manufacturing facility designed to produce up to 12,000 humanoid robots annually. - The broader humanoid robot market is projected to reach between $4 billion and $5 billion in 2026, with global unit installations growing from near-zero in 2023 to an estimated 16,000 in 2025. - Key competitors in the rapidly expanding humanoid space include Tesla's Optimus, Boston Dynamics' electric Atlas, Agility Robotics, and a significant number of manufacturers based in China.
