Nobody likes doing the dishes or tidying up after wayward teenagers, but home help can often be costly. However, scroll through social media and you might be fooled into believing a new dawn is at hand. Humanoid robots recently completed a half-marathon in Beijing in record-breaking time and slick videos of bots doing tasks around the house are being shared by humanoid robotic companies. So where do you line up to get your own friendly automated helper? Turns out it’s trickier than you might think.
“Right now in the UK it is difficult, but not impossible, to buy humanoids,” says Jonathan Aitken, a robotics expert at the University of Sheffield. The ones that are close to being available tend to be those that are in the headlines, such as Tesla’s Optimus and 1X’s Neo bots. Others, which have garnered less publicity, but are nonetheless interesting bits of hardware, like Unitree’s G1 humanoid robot, which costs a smidgen less than £20,000, can be in your home later this summer. While a UBTech Walker E is three times the price.
There are some catches, though — the Unitree comes without hands, which cost extra. “The market for humanoids is incredibly vibrant at the moment,” says Aitken, “and there is considerable interest.”
Unsurprisingly, China has been leading the way when it comes to humanoid development. “China has focused on the production of these robots, mainly due to a demographic shift in its population meaning that there’s a reduction in the number of workers available,” says Aitken. “In essence they’ve gone all-in on inexpensive humanoids being the option to cover the gap.”
That’s something Sam Baker, an investor at Planet A, who recently visited China and saw how they’re developing humanoids, agrees with. The reason UK consumers cannot buy humanoid robots off the shelf is not mainly lack of demand, Baker says, but “supply chain and scale of manufacturability”. China is much further ahead, with some places already close to consumer walk-in purchases.
The China question
Getting to the point when you can walk into John Lewis and pick a humanoid helper off the shelves is “at least a generation away”, reckons Baker. “I don’t think this is something that we solve in the next 10 years.” But it’s likely that we’ll be able to pick up the bots from specialist retailers — probably online — in the same way that people in China currently can, and will soon be able to at a wider scale.
The reason why China is so far ahead isn’t just down to the necessity of needing those robot workers to cover shortfalls in their staffing. China is the world’s factory for tech equipment, which means it’s able to produce equipment at “two orders of magnitude” cheaper and faster than we could if we were to build a home-grown alternative. In addition, the stuff that makes humanoids work — the small motors and gizmos within the bots’ bodies — is often made from products that China has far better access to than anyone else.
“They have 90 per cent — or something along those lines — of the world’s rare earth metal processing capacity,” says Baker.
“No matter where in the world a rare earth metal gets mined, it needs to end up in the Chinese supply chain in order to be turned into a magnet that can be installed on a motor that goes in a robot.”
Even then, most of those robots don’t end up in the home. The gap might not seem all that stark in industry. While China currently sits 22nd in the International Federation of Robotics’ table of robot density per working population, the UK is just two places behind in 24th. But in everyday use, China is racing ahead — though is capped by limitations.
Robot kitchen nightmares
“What most people imagine when they think about humanoids as a consumer facing technology is humanoids in your home, and I think even in China, this is still some distance away, primarily because of safety,” says Baker. The AI systems that act as the robot’s “brain” are still relatively rudimentary, and struggle in new environments — or ones that are constantly changing, such as a home. Factories can be kept relatively clear of obstacles, but a robot would struggle with the quickly-kicked-off trainers your teenagers leave by the door, or the prowling cat that is territorial about its corner of the kitchen.
Because of that, humanoids are being treated with kid gloves at present. “Economic factors are driving the use of humanoids,” says Aitken. “It’s likely we’ll see a focus of humanoids working safely in mixed environments before we see an increase in the power.”
He also agrees that we’ll need significant improvements in the perception and understanding of the environment by robots. “An example I often give is a robot that is unstacking a dishwasher and turns around holding a knife,” he says. If there’s a person behind it, or a child underneath it, they could be at risk from the movement or from a failure of the robot’s grasp. “The environment will present significant challenges and we need some concrete guarantees that robots can operate well in these environments, or have the capability to fall-back to safe states,” he says.
Until that point, you might want to hold off on inviting a humanoid helper into your home.
