The goal is to get the robots working with actual humans in areas such as manufacturing, facility operations and health care.

Watch Figure AI's humanoid robot flawlessly sort packages for a full hour, showcasing precision, speed, and real-world industrial potential.

See new human-shaped robots, including MIMA’s skill-glove training for dishes and laundry, so you can gauge real home-ready progress.

In some sense, Mr. Brooks has only himself to blame. The current humanoid craze is “kind of his fault,” said Anthony Jules, Mr. Brooks’s co-founder and C.E.O. at Robust.AI, which is building automated carts to work alongside humans in distribution centers.

General-purpose robots remain rare not for a lack of hardware but because we still can’t give machines the physical intuition humans learn through experience

Robots small enough to travel autonomously through the human body to repair damaged sites may seem the stuff of science fiction dreams. But this vision of surgery on a microscale is a step closer to reality,