Agility Robotics marked a milestone in humanoid deployments by announcing MercadoLibre as its newest customer, deploying the Digit humanoid to expand warehouse capacity and augment human workers right now.
"We are deploying Digit to expand their capacity and extend human potential — not someday, but today." — Agility Robotics
This real-world rollout underscores the shift from prototypes to production-scale operations in logistics.
Dexterity remains the linchpin for next-gen humanoids, as highlighted at the ongoing [ Humanoids Summit(https://x.com/TheSanctuaryAI/status/1999161162592911865) where Sanctuary AI CEO James Wells is discussing the next wave with dexterity front and center.
A curated 2025 overview of top dexterous five-finger hands from Mehrdad M. F. showcases hardware progress, featuring options with at least six active degrees of freedom—though skeptics like Chris Paxton question the need for all five fingers, noting successes from Boston Dynamics and Sunday Robotics with three. These off-the-shelf advances are fueling broader adoption.
Google DeepMind showcased open-ended robot reasoning beyond scripted feats like backflips, featuring Apptronik's Apollo adapting to complex instructions and contexts in lab demos.
"Pre-programmed backflips are fun, but open-ended reasoning is the real challenge for robots." — Google DeepMind
Chris Paxton praised huge open-source datasets as "impressive," spotlighting the Humanoid Everyday dataset—over 10k trajectories of dexterous mobile manipulation at 30Hz with depth sensors and language labels, ideal for fine-tuning vision-language-action models.
TrendForce forecasts humanoid shipments exploding past 50,000 units annually by 2026—a 700% surge—aligning with broader hype around scaling to millions.
Boston Dynamics' latest Atlas demo reveals custom batteries, 3D-printed titanium-aluminum parts, and whole-body dynamic control for complex terrains, while NEO's teleoperation with VR backflips demonstrates balanced, non-1:1 puppeteering via high-level intents and onboard safety controllers.
Elderly care humanoids are nascent but promising, with ROBOTGYM videos showing robots offering companionship, meal prep, bed folding, health monitoring, and emergency calls—echoed by RobotGym's Qijia Q1 wheelchair-bot that even microwaves food. Beyond bipedals, robot dogs with arms handle power plant inspections, Pudu's cool quadrupeds shine in Shenzhen, and PADBOT's S5 outdoor patrol bot—a "cute Cybertruck"—autonomously recharges after hilarious patrols.
China's Hangzhou International Airport deployed the nation's first track-guided bird-dispersion robot for 24/7 runway protection via smart patrols and HD cameras. In navigation research, TU Delft's DRA-MPPI planner enables safe robot motion through dense pedestrian crowds using risk-aware trajectory sampling and collision probability estimates, outperforming baselines in real Jackal robot tests without freezing.
These threads—from warehouse scaling and dexterous hardware to care bots and market forecasts—signal robotics entering a deployment-heavy phase, with dexterity and mobility datasets accelerating practical autonomy.
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