Humanoid Robotics: Key Players and Platforms in 2026

Boston Dynamics — Atlas (electric)

Boston Dynamics unveiled the production-ready version of its all-electric Atlas at CES 2026, standing roughly 190 cm tall, weighing about 90 kg, with 56 degrees of freedom, tactile hands, and a 50 kg payload capacity. AI on the platform is developed with Google DeepMind. Production started at Boston Dynamics' Boston headquarters immediately after the unveiling, and 2026's output is fully committed to two customers: Hyundai's Robotics Metaplant Application Center and Google DeepMind. Hyundai is targeting factory deployment — parts sequencing on car production lines — by 2028. That programme now has a physical home: the Robot Metaplant Application Center opened at Hyundai’s Metaplant America outside Savannah, Georgia in September 2026, running pilot operations since June and training Atlas on automotive parts logistics and sequencing. It moves into a building roughly ten times larger in 2027, and Hyundai has said it intends to deploy 25,000 Atlas units across its plants over the coming years, supported by a US factory sized for 30,000 robots annually.

On 7 October 2026 Hyundai named Rohit Prasad, formerly head of Amazon’s Alexa and AGI work, as Boston Dynamics’ CEO after eight months under an interim chief. The job is the Atlas ramp: Semafor put output at about four units a month in May, against a 30,000-a-year plant planned for 2028.

Read our full company profile of Boston Dynamics →

Agility Robotics — Digit

Digit is already working commercial shifts at Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and Mercado Libre, with more than 65,000 cumulative operating hours logged across nine customer facilities and over $300 million in multi-year orders for its next-generation Digit 5, which Agility formally unveiled in September 2026 and markets as the first “cooperatively safe” humanoid — designed to work in closer proximity to people rather than behind a fence. Agility opened a 60,000 sq ft "Physical AI" development hub in Fremont, California, and is moving toward a public listing via a business combination with Churchill Capital Corp XI, valuing the company at roughly $2.5 billion pre-money.

Read our full company profile of Agility Robotics →

Figure AI — Figure 03

Figure's third-generation robot, unveiled in October 2025, was designed from the start for both commercial floors and home use — soft, washable textiles instead of exposed machined parts, and a wireless charging pad instead of a docking cable. Figure AI says it took under 120 days to scale Figure 03 production from one unit per day to one per hour, delivering more than 350 units in the process. A new "System 0" whole-body control capability lets Figure 03 handle stairs, ramps, and uneven terrain using only its onboard stereo cameras, without task-specific programming.

Read our full company profile of Figure AI →

Tesla — Optimus V3

Tesla’s third-generation Optimus has still not been formally revealed as of October 2026, so what follows is what Tesla has said about it rather than a published specification: 173 cm, 57 kg, hands with 22 degrees of freedom driven by 50 actuators moved into the forearm, running on Tesla’s new AI5 chip with xAI’s Grok handling voice interaction. Tesla is building a dedicated Optimus production line at its Fremont factory, with Elon Musk publicly warning that scaling humanoid manufacturing will be harder than any production ramp the company has attempted — expect a "long and flat" start. Current build cost is estimated at $50,000–$100,000+ per unit, well above the long-term target of $20,000–$30,000; first consumer units aren’t expected before the end of 2027.

In late September The Information reported several hundred Optimus units a week coming off the Fremont line — for internal use, not a customer version, with hands still assembled by hand. Reported output is not a shipment, and the scoreboard treats it that way.

Read our full programme profile of Tesla Optimus →

Apptronik — Apollo / Apollo 2

Apollo weighs about 70 kg, runs on swappable batteries for roughly four hours per charge, and was designed around simplified, modular actuators to keep repair and manufacturing costs down. Apptronik is producing the robot with manufacturing partner Jabil, and in June 2026 opened "Robot Park," a nearly 90,000 sq ft training facility in Austin, Texas, where fleets of Apollo 2 units — available in both bipedal and wheeled-base configurations — generate embodied-AI training data in partnership with Google DeepMind. Apollo 3, described as Apptronik's first true commercial product, is targeted for 2027.

Read our full company profile of Apptronik →

XPeng — IRON

The other carmaker making Tesla’s bet, and currently further along it. XPeng opened a dedicated IRON production line in September 2026 with more than 80% of core processes automated, and has held to mass production by the end of 2026 with sales in China and abroad from 2027. The robot carries 76 degrees of freedom in the body and 21 in each hand. The comparison with Optimus is unavoidable and instructive: both are car companies applying volume manufacturing discipline to humanoids, but XPeng has a line running while Tesla’s third-generation reveal has slipped repeatedly.

Read our full company profile of XPeng Robotics →

UBTECH — Walker S2

China’s listed humanoid incumbent and the first company anywhere to put full-size industrial humanoids into series delivery. Walker S2 swaps its own battery autonomously — the practical answer to a shift longer than one charge — and is deployed in automotive plants, smart factories and logistics centres, against an order book above 800 million yuan. Production capacity is the real story: the Liuzhou plant that came online in September 2026 is rated at 10,000 robots a year, assembling roughly one android every ten minutes largely by machine.

Read our full company profile of UBTECH Robotics →

AgiBot (Zhiyuan Robotics) — A2

Founded in 2023 and already, by its own account, shipping 8,400 humanoids in the first half of 2026 — a figure it puts at 44% of the global total. Roughly 7,000 of its cumulative output is bipedal; the rest is wheeled and other form factors, a distinction worth keeping in mind when comparing headline numbers across companies. AgiBot develops its own embodied foundation model, Genie Operator, now in its second generation, rather than licensing a brain. It raised at a 15 billion yuan valuation in a Tencent-led round and filed for a Hong Kong listing in July 2026, which would make it the sector’s second public pure-play after Unitree.

Read our full company profile of AgiBot →

Galbot — G1 / S1 / ET1

The one company here aimed squarely at retail rather than factories. Galbot Stores — unstaffed shops where the robot is the shop assistant, finding products, fetching them and handling the transaction — run in more than thirty Chinese cities, which makes this the largest deployment anywhere of a humanoid as the primary service provider rather than as a material handler. The S1 works up to eight hours and changes its own battery. Galbot raised 2.5 billion yuan (about $300 million) and showed ET1, its first fully bipedal machine, at the World Robot Conference in August 2026; the shipping units so far are wheeled-base manipulators, which is a large part of why they work reliably enough to leave in a shop.

Read our full company profile of Galbot →

Unitree — R1, G1, H1

China's Unitree occupies the low end of the price curve: the R1 launched in mid-2025 at $5,900, the G1 lists from roughly $13,500–$17,990 depending on channel (EDU research variants run $43,900–$73,900), and the older, more industrial H1 was priced near $90,000. The G1 has become something of a public showcase — a fleet performed a televised, fully autonomous kung fu routine in February 2026, and a hardened unit logged 130,000 steps in -47°C conditions during a cold-weather test in northwest China. Unitree became the sector’s first pure-play public company on 19 August 2026, listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market at 150.8 yuan a share and raising about 6.1 billion yuan ($905 million) — well above the $610 million it had sought. The stock rose as much as 629% intraday before closing up 460% at 845 yuan, valuing the company around 342 billion yuan (roughly $50 billion) against an IPO price that had implied about $9 billion. The prospectus is the first audited look anyone has had at a humanoid maker’s books: 1.71 billion yuan ($250 million) of 2025 revenue at close to 60% gross margin, 600 million yuan of adjusted net profit, 5,500 humanoids sold, and an average selling price that fell from 593,400 yuan in 2023 to 167,600 yuan in 2025.

Read our full company profile of Unitree Robotics →

1X Technologies — NEO

NEO is 1X's bet on the home: 5'5", under 66 lbs, with 22-degree-of-freedom hands, a soft body built from 3D-lattice polymer structures, and a claimed noise level of just 22 dB. It's rated to lift up to 154 lbs and carry around 55 lbs, and is aimed at basic household tasks — tidying, fetching items, answering the door. Early Access units are priced at $20,000 (with a $499/month subscription option), and 1X says it booked 10,000 preorders in the first five days of taking them. Full-scale production began in April 2026, with first units targeted for delivery later this year.

Read our full company profile of 1X Technologies →