This Week’s Humanoid Moves

Figure turns the demo into a shift

Figure set out to show F.03 robots running an eight-hour package-sorting shift. By the time the stream was still going, the benchmark had moved. Brett Adcock posted that the robots were still going and reached 24 hours of continuous humanoid work, with over 30,000 packages sorted and all three named robots, Bob, Frank, and Gary, still healthy.

The task was narrow, F.03 had to detect a barcode, pick up a small package, and place it barcode-side down onto a conveyor. Figure said the robots were running fully autonomously on Helix-02, its in-house neural network, with inference handled onboard rather than through remote teleoperation. Figure framed the system around camera-pixel reasoning, package handling at roughly human sorting speed, and multi-robot coordination for battery swaps and failover.

The livestream also drew the expected skepticism. Some viewers pointed to movements they thought looked like teleoperation. Figure’s answer was that the policy lifted its arm during cross-body reach to avoid striking a metal chute.

This is a change in pace from the usual polished humanoid clip (and a great one at that). The task was simpler than many of the household or general-purpose demos now circulating, but the format raised the risk. A staged video can hide reset time, intervention, dead batteries, bad grasps and failed recovery and sets unrealistic expectations of where these machines are at.

Figure was not the first humanoid company to lean into this format. Agility Robotics was doing fully autonomous live demonstrations with Digit at ProMat in 2023, including warehouse-style tote handling in a replica work cell. Agility also publicly noted that Digit had a 99 percent success rate across about 20 hours of live demos, including the now-famous fall that became its own proof point for durability and recovery.

But Figure’s stream still pushes the category forward because it resets the expectation for what serious humanoid demos should show. Not just a robot doing one impressive thing once, but a system running long enough for coordination, failure handling, battery management and throughput to matter.

Schaeffler and Humanoid move toward factory deployment

UK-based Humanoid signed a deal to deploy thousands of wheeled humanoid robots across Schaeffler’s manufacturing network by 2032, with first systems expected at two German sites before the end of 2026.

The reported rollout builds on the companies’ January partnership, which covered actuator supply and a purchase agreement for humanoids in Schaeffler’s global production network. Schaeffler said it would become the preferred actuator supplier for Humanoid’s wheeled systems.

The structure is interesting because Schaeffler is both a buyer and a supplier. Humanoid would place robots into Schaeffler factories while sourcing part of the motion stack from the same industrial group.

Source: Humanoid

Zhejiang Humanoid and Jack Technology point at vertical orders

Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center reportedly announced a partnership with Jack Technology and an order for 2,000 garment-manufacturing humanoid robots.

The work is aimed at garment-line tasks including fabric identification, grasping, spreading, positioning, template opening and closing, fabric pinching, stacking and unloading.

Although this is a task that comes with challenges, apparel production deals with flexible material that changes shape under contact. Fabric can wrinkle, slide, fold, sag or stretch between pick, spread and placement, so the robot has to keep updating the state of the material while it moves it through the line.

Source: Zhejiang Humanoid.

Rotaku

Rotaku exited stealth and surfaced Domo as a low-cost humanoid platform for developers and makers. Its reservation page lists Domo Basic at $2,999, with a higher Domo Developer package adding SDK access, simulation and URDF support, and whole-body policy-training tools.

Domo sits 90 cm tall with 23 DoF, aimed at basic motion control, teleoperation, simulation work and early manipulation experiments.

Source: Rotaku

Unitree

Unitree pushed the opposite end of the week’s humanoid spectrum with GD01, a large manned mecha-style machine priced around $650,000. It is spectacle hardware, closer to brand entertainment and public attention. Considering the virality, it is a worthwhile experiment for them and this is on trend, Unitree keeps turning hardware experimentation into distribution.

Have a robotics update Korthos should review? Send news, deployments, product releases, funding rounds, research, or media to tips@korthos.xyz or reach out on X at @agkorthos.