For an industry that’s only just getting started, there’s a lot of hype around humanoid robots.

You can thank Elon Musk and his bold pronouncements around Tesla’s Optimus robot. Morgan Stanley also threw gasoline on the hype fire with its forecast of nearly 1 billion humanoids in service by 2050 amid a $5 trillion market. And then there are the slick internet videos showing human-shaped robots doing back flips, cartwheels and other spectacular feats.

The reality is that most people overestimate what robots can do at this point in their development. It’s also true that humanoid robots have advanced rapidly in the last decade when they were expensive laboratory experiments at universities and specialty firms such as Boston Dynamics. Now these mobile machines with arms are being deployed mostly as pilot projects in warehouses, factories and even hospitals.

With these early humanoid robot deployments, the barriers around safety, power supply and machine learning are much clearer now for achieving the goal of building general-purpose mobile robots that can perform multiple tasks around humans at a reasonable cost. These robots, which include models that have wheels instead of legs, represent the last evolutionary step for robots that began more than six decades ago as clunky, pneumatically driven machines that were bolted to the floor and caged off from workers.

The importance of developing a U.S. home-grown humanoid robot industry that includes assembly and the full supply chain — motors, actuators, sensors, chips, cameras, battery packs, etc. — can’t be overstated. Similar to shipbuilding and even drones, the products will be integral to the civilian economy with........

© The Japan Times