This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 24, 2025 - March 30, 2025

READERS of this Tech column might recall a piece I wrote about travelling on Waymo Robotaxis in Phoenix, Arizona, (My day in Phoenix in driverless Waymo robotaxis, The Edge, Issue 1549, Nov 11,2024) last year. More recently, I wrote about Los Angeles-based Serve Robotics, whose robots deliver Shake Shack burgers in Hollywood and bibimbap (rice mixed with vegetables and chilli pepper paste) in the city’s Koreatown to customers’ doors. If you are a tourist walking around Hollywood or searching for bulgogi, as I like to do whenever I am there, chances are you will bump into one of the robots. They are just about on every sidewalk and street corner, almost like they own the streets of Los Angeles.

Forget all the highfalutin sci-fi stuff from the future. Look around you, the robots are already here. They are not just delivering food to movie stars, or driving journalists like me in Robotaxis, or helping perform complex robotic surgeries in hospitals, they are also assisting nurses in caring for the sick and supporting caregivers in helping the elderly. They are in factories, helping to make the stuff we use daily, or welding and painting cars, or in farms picking fruit and vegetables. They are in stores stacking shelves or at the back in the pharmacies sorting pills and medicines. As drones, they are making themselves useful for surveillance or gathering intelligence. They are also in warehouses, packing the boxes from Amazon and Costco. Clearly, you can no longer ignore them or avoid them.

The word “robot” was first used in 1920 by Czech playwright Karel apek in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots to describe human-looking machines used for mundane labour. Not long ago, I visited one of the highly automated Infinite Kitchens that fast-casual restaurant chain Sweetgreen runs in New York. A friend recommended it, so I decided to check out its kitchens. Its robots prepare salads in bowls, allowing human staff to focus on the order’s finishing touches. Infinite Kitchens can produce 400 to 500 bowls an hour, or 50% more than a regular restaurant, with a far smaller staff. In Southeast Asia, smart delivery robots like Pudu Bellabot, that cost just US$15,000 (RM66,300) a piece, are now increasingly common in KFC, Pizza Hut and even the Filipino Jolibee franchises delivering food and beverages and even interacting with guests. During my last trip to Japan, I recall seeing quite a few variations of sushi robots.

Here is the thing: Pudu Bellabots or sushi robots, or my own floor-cleaning Roomba (I kept kicking it around my living room until it died on me), or logistics and delivery robots don’t look anything like a human. Amazon uses a robot that has an arm, a camera and monitor on its head. The narrative until recently was that while automation was indeed becoming ubiquitous with robots in factories, warehouses, food delivery and food preparation, the real robots or the ones we humans are afraid of, which look like the ones we saw in Star Wars, were at least a decade away.

The world really needs robots. For one thing, the demographics are deteriorating. There just aren’t enough humans to do the job. Japan is a rapidly ageing society. More than 10% of Japanese are now over the age of 80, and currently 31% of the population is over 65 years of age. China’s demographic problem could turn out be even worse than Japan’s over the next few decades. With a population that peaked at 1.43 billion in 2021, China will shrink to just 630 million people in 74 years, according to UN’s World’s Population Prospects. That’s a decrease of over 56%. Someone has to grow food, deliver groceries, peel the prawns, chop the onions without shedding a tear and cook the food in restaurants or homes and, of course, write the code for AI-powered software to automate the factories which will make robotaxis and flying cars. Fortunately, we will have the robots to thank for.

The arrival of robots should boost productivity and transform an array of industries. Automation’s impact on productivity has changed the face of industries over the years. The advent of the washing machine reduced the time needed to do the laundry by 87%. After Henry Ford installed an assembly line a century ago to produce the Model T, the first mass-market motorised vehicle, automakers needed 88% less time to manufacture a passenger car. The arrival of Kiva robots at Amazon’s warehouse a decade ago cut online shopping time from click to ship by 78%.

What’s next? Think Humanoid robots, or artificial intelligence-powered machines designed to mimic human motion and interaction. What makes the human form factor so special? Humanoid robots are more versatile and generalisable. “While a wrench can tighten nuts better than a human hand can, it is not a generalisable tool,” says a recent report on robots by ARK Invest, tech-focused US asset management firm. “The human hand is generalisable, particularly in an environment built by and designed for humans.”

In late February, someone forwarded to me a link to a YouTube video featuring start-up Figure AI’s Helix, its new in-house generalist vision-language-action (VLA) model for humanoid robot, which unifies perception, language understanding and motion control. Helix uses a single set of neural network weights to learn all behaviours and enables multi-robot collaboration. Before I get into what Helix can do, a bit about Figure AI. It launched its first humanoid robot Figure 01 in early 2023, just weeks after ChatGPT was unveiled. Around the time, Figure AI raised US$70 million in its Series A round from venture capital firms at US$400 million valuation. Last year, it raised US$675 million at US$2.6 billion valuation. Last week, Figure AI raised another US$1.5 billion at a whopping US$40 billion valuation. That’s a hundredfold increase in just two years. If someone tells you that AI is yesterday’s story or that robots are just a pie in the sky, you should tell them about Figure AI which last week was valued 100 times more than what VC  firms were willing to pay for it two years ago.

Humanoid robots can understand and execute tasks just by listening to us. Google these keywords — Helix, kitchen, two robots, YouTube — to watch the video of humanoid robots performing tasks in the kitchen through simple voice commands. In the video you will see two of the firm’s second-generation humanoid robots Figure 02 working together to carry the task of figuring out whether an apple, Snickers chocolate bar, a box of tissues need to be placed in the refrigerator or straight into the pantry. The system is powered by two AI components: a multimodal language model with seven billion parameters that processes both speech and visual data at 7- to 9hertz, acting as the robot’s brain. The second is an 80-million-parameter AI that translates these instructions into precise motor movements at 200hertz. Helix controls 35° of freedom in real time, allowing for intricate motions from individual finger movements to full-body coordination of the robots. The two robots worked, organised food inside a refrigerator without any prior exposure to any of the specific items they were given. The system only required 500 hours of training data, or significantly less than other similar AI projects. Since the entire system runs on embedded Nvidia GPUs or graphics processing units inside the robots, it is ideal for commercial use. These robots can handle things as fragile as eggs and place them in the refrigerator without making an omelette on the floor.

Unlike traditional robots that require specific programming for each task, Helix enables them to interact with new objects and situations without prior training. Figure AI’s CEO Brett Adcock says Helix is a major step towards making robots useful in our everyday life. While Helix’s real-world effectiveness still needs to be fully tested, its ability to adapt without constant reprogramming is a game changer, Adcock says. Figure had partnered with OpenAI to develop Helix but the two firms have since parted ways. Now it is developing its own AI models for high-speed robot control. For its part, OpenAI recently started hiring engineers for a new in-house robotics team.

Here’s what inside a Humanoid robot: it’s “brain” is a mix of semiconductors and software, including  the foundational GenAI models for autonomy and  simulation models or digital twins for training. It’s  “body” is mainly sensors (cameras, Lidar, force, torque, magnetic, etc), actuators (or motors, encoders, bearings, screws, and reducers), a web of wires and connectors, and a lithium-ion battery mounted in the center of the chest. Their exterior is a mix of aluminum alloys and plastics to minimise weight.

More 20 companies from around the world, mostly American or Chinese, are racing to produce their own humanoid robot. Among the nine humanoid robots in the photo, you don’t see those that are being developed by Nvidia, Apple, Meta Platform, Open AI, or China’s Baidu, which are also in the race. So, when will we see the first commercial humanoid robot? Tesla has 2027 target release date for its Optimus humanoid. Even if it is a year late and gets out by 2028, it is just three years away. 

Humanoid robots like Kime are pouring and serving drinks for customers and handing out snacks at self-contained kiosks in Spain. Other humanoid robots are working as hotel concierges or have taken other customer-facing roles. Humanoid Robots like NAO and Pepper, developed by Aldebaran Robotics (now part of United Robotics Group), are working with students in educational settings, creating content and teaching programming. Pepper is designed for human interaction and social applications, while NAO is more focused on STEM, or science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. Humanoid robots in hospitals are providing services like communicating patient information and measuring vital signs.

Just how big is the Humanoid opportunity? ARK Invest estimates that Household robots will eventually be a US$13 trillion opportunity while industrial robots market could also be around a similar size by 2030. Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes there could be over one billion humanoids on earth by the 2040s. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang believes humanoid robots will eventually become as common as cars and anticipates significant breakthroughs in the next two to three years.

Bank of America in a recent research report forecasts sales of one million in 2030 and robot population of over three billion in 2060. The bank estimates the Tesla’s Optimus Gen 2 humanoid robot’s total content cost would be about US$50,000 to US$60,000 if all of the major components are made outside China. If most Optimus hardware is made in China, the content cost can be lowered to US$35,000 by the end of this year and further decline to US$17,000 per humanoid robot by 2030. The sweet spot is probably under US$10,000, possibly closer to US$5,000. To get there you need economies of scale like those seen by smartphones industry. People in ageing societies would happily pay US$5,000 for a humanoid robot that would do most of household chores and help out in the kitchen. The future envisioned by Capek in his play has already arrived.

Assif Shameen is a technology and business writer based in North America 

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