What Are Humanoid Robots Used For? Deployments, Pilots and Announcements, Sorted

Five kinds of use, five kinds of evidence

A humanoid robot in 2026 is used in one of five ways: paid work for a named customer, a pilot at a customer site, a use that exists only as an announcement or target, research and teaching, and entertainment including competitions and rental. Each tier has its own kind of evidence. A customer press release, a company filing, a journalist's visit and a company livestream do not carry the same weight, and this guide labels every item with its tier and its source. [1] [2]

Paid deployments with named customers

Agility Robotics' Digit at GXO Logistics is the clearest case. GXO's own release of 27 June 2024 describes a multi-year robots-as-a-service agreement at a Spanx facility, where Digit moves totes from collaborative robots onto conveyors, building on a pilot the year before. Agility later said Digit had moved more than 100,000 totes at the Flowery Branch, Georgia site, and its September 2026 announcement, filed with the SEC, states about 98 percent on-task accuracy at GXO and more than 65,000 cumulative hours across the fleet. The robot count has never been disclosed. [1] [3] [4]

The June 2026 merger filing adds the commercial picture: deployment commitments across nine customer facilities, over 300 million dollars of multi-year contracted Digit v5 orders subject to milestones, and Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Mercado Libre as named customers. The same process disclosed 1.8 million dollars of net sales in 2025 against a 140 million dollar operating loss, which is the scale of paid humanoid work at the company with the longest deployment record. [5] [6]

Figure's agreement with Catalyst Brands of 26 May 2026 is described by Figure as a commercial agreement to deploy humanoids in the retailer's distribution network, starting at its Reno, Nevada centre. No robot count, start date or payment terms are given. In China, UBTech reported 921 full-size humanoids sold in the first half of 2026 and 590 million yuan of humanoid revenue in its interim results, without naming the buyers; its November 2025 release lists BYD, Dongfeng Liuzhou, Geely, FAW-Volkswagen Qingdao, Audi FAW, BAIC New Energy, Foxconn and SF Express as customers or partners without per-customer values. [7] [8] [9]

Pilots in car plants and warehouses

BMW's release of 25 June 2026 closes the best-documented pilot. Figure 02 worked in the Spartanburg body shop inserting sheet-metal parts for welding and, in BMW's words, supported production of more than 30,000 X3 vehicles over ten months; the pilot is described as completed. Figure 03 is to start on logistics sequencing, picking unsorted parts from containers into trolleys, with no count or payment stated. [10]

Mercedes-Benz and Apptronik signed a commercial agreement in March 2024 to explore delivering assembly kits, inspecting components and moving totes. A Reuters report of March 2025 puts a handful of Apollo robots at Berlin-Marienfelde and Kecskemét, learning through teleoperation, with a Mercedes investment described as a low double-digit million euro sum. Jabil runs Apollos on intralogistics tasks in one of its own factories while building the robot as Apptronik's manufacturing partner. UBTech's Walker S1 sorted materials and installed components at Zeekr's Ningbo plant in 2025, described as factory interns. Mercado Libre is testing Digit in San Antonio. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]

The IFR's first count of the market, reported in September 2026, puts the pattern in numbers: about 7,000 humanoids sold worldwide in 2025, many bought to generate training data rather than to do work, and carmaker pilots that run single- or double-digit fleets. [2]

Announcements and targets

Tesla's Q4 2025 update says preparations are under way for the first Optimus production line, with the start of production planned before the end of 2026 and an eventual planned capacity of one million robots per year. The Q2 2026 update says the Fremont Model S and X lines were decommissioned for first-generation Optimus lines and that initial builds will be used in the Optimus Academy for training-data collection. No Tesla document states a number of robots at work in a factory. [16] [17]

Hyundai Motor Group said at CES 2026 that Atlas will be introduced at Metaplant America in Georgia from 2028, starting with parts sequencing and expanding to assembly by 2030, alongside a 30,000-unit annual production target. Schaeffler has three separate plans on record: Agility humanoids across its 100 plants by 2030, a mid-four-digit number of Neura humanoids by 2035, and a binding phased deployment of Humanoid's wheeled units at Herzogenaurach and Schweinfurt from December 2026 to June 2027. AgiBot reported its 15,000th robot produced in June 2026, a production count rather than a shipment figure. [18] [19] [20] [21] [22]

For the home, 1X opened NEO orders in October 2025 at 20,000 dollars or 499 dollars per month with first consumer shipments planned for 2026, and opened a Hayward factory in April 2026 with units so far going to development and internal home testing. 1X says owners can schedule a 1X Expert to guide the robot through unknown tasks; a Wall Street Journal visit, reported by Road to VR, saw no task performed autonomously. Figure's May 2026 livestream of 22,000 packages over 17 hours was run by the company at an unnamed site and is not an audit. [23] [24] [25] [26]

Research and teaching

The largest documented use by unit count may be the laboratory. Unitree lists the G1 from 13,500 US dollars and the H1 at 90,000 dollars with a note to ask for the real price, and both appear across 2025 and 2026 papers, from motion tracking without fine-tuning to the posture and reflex studies covered on this site. These robots are bought to run experiments and collect data, which is consistent with the IFR's remark that many 2025 sales were made to generate data rather than to perform work. [27] [28] [29] [2]

How OCLO coordinates a humanoid's body: a G1 research example

Entertainment, competition and rental

The World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing are the largest documented gathering of working humanoids. The first edition in August 2025 drew 280 teams, more than 500 robots, 16 countries and 26 events. The organizers' figures for the second edition in August 2026 are 666 teams, 2,056 robots and 51 events, with a 100 m record of 9.39 s. [30] [31]

Rental is the other paid use that can be priced. China Daily reported in May 2026 that a Unitree G1 rents for 2,500 to 3,500 yuan a day, that humanoid day rates fell from about 30,000 yuan in early 2025 to about 3,000, and that 38,200 robot-rental businesses were registered in 2025 according to Qichacha. The rental article on this site reads those rates against the service delivered. [32]

Read the Chinese humanoid day rate against the service

What no one has published: independent productivity data

No independent measurement of a humanoid's throughput or uptime at a customer site was found. The site metrics that exist, 100,000 totes, 98 percent on-task accuracy, 65,000 fleet hours, 30,000 cars, 22,000 packages, all originate with the vendor, even when a customer or a regulator repeats them. Agility's SEC filings disclose contracted orders and revenue but no uptime or throughput. Gartner's January 2026 forecast that fewer than 20 companies will take humanoids into production for manufacturing and supply chain by 2028 is qualitative and gives no figures either. [4] [10] [26] [33]

The practical reading for a buyer is to ask a vendor for three things that none of the sources above contain: robots in the field at one site, hours per day on task, and interventions per hour. A use is a deployment when those numbers are shared under contract, and a pilot until then. [5] [2]