But what really makes it feel like humanoid summer is the videos. Seemingly every month brings a new moody, futuristic video featuring a humanoid staring intensely (or unnervingly) into the camera, jumping around, or sorting things into piles. Sometimes they even speak.
Such videos have heightened currency in robotics right now. As Goldberg says, you can’t just fire up a humanoid robot at home and play around with it the way you can with the latest release of ChatGPT. So for anyone hoping to ride the AI wave or demonstrate their progress—like a startup or an academic seeking lab funding—a good humanoid video is the best marketing tool available. “The imagery, visuals, and videos—they’ve played a big role,” he says.
But what do they show, exactly? I’ve watched dozens of them this year, and I confess I frequently oscillate between being impressed, scared, and bored. I wanted a more sophisticated eye to help me figure out the right questions to ask. Goldberg was happy to help.
Watch out for movie magic
First, some basics. The most important thing to know is whether a robot is being tele-operated by a human off screen rather than executing the tasks autonomously. Unfortunately, you can’t tell unless the company discloses it in the video, which they don’t always do.
The second issue is selection bias. How many takes were necessary to get that perfect shot? If a humanoid shows off an impressive ability to sort objects, but it took 200 tries to do the task successfully, that matters.
Lastly, is the video sped up? Oftentimes that can be totally reasonable if it’s skipping over things that don’t demonstrate much about the robot (“I don’t want to watch the paint dry,” Goldberg says). But if the video is sped up to intentionally hide something or make the robot seem more effective than it is, that’s worth flagging. All of these editing decisions should, ideally, be disclosed by the robotics company or lab.
Look at the hands
A trope I’ve noticed in humanoid videos is that they show off the robot’s hands by having the fingers curl gently into a fist. A robotic hand with that many usable joints is indeed more complex than the grippers shown on industrial robots, Goldberg says, but those humanoid hands may not be capable of what the videos sometimes suggest.
For example, humanoids are often shown holding a box while walking. The shot may suggest they’re using their hands the way humans would—placing their fingers underneath the box and lifting up. But often, Goldberg says, the robots are actually just squeezing the box horizontally, with the force coming from the shoulder. It still works, but not the way I’d imagined. Most videos don’t show the hands doing much at all—unsurprising, since hand dexterity requires enormously complicated engineering.
