Research · MIT Technology Review
Roboticists tapped to dream big but build small
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They’d hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they’d spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants.
Key facts
- The machines are yet unbuilt, but the money is flowing: Companies and investors put $6.1 billion into humanoid robots in 2025 alone, four times what was invested in 2024
- By 2024, Covariant had released a robotics model, RFM-1, that you could interact with like a coworker
- When it had seen tasks before, it carried out 97% of them successfully; it succeeded at 76% of the instructions it hadn’t seen
- An MIT robotics researcher named Cynthia Breazeal introduced an armless, legless, faceless robot called Jibo to the world in 2014
Summary
Roboticists used to dream big but build small. The real ambition for many of these researchers was the robot of science fiction—one that could move through the world, adapt to different environments, and interact safely and helpfully with people. The machines are yet unbuilt, but the money is flowing: Companies and investors put $6.1 billion into humanoid robots in 2025 alone, four times what was invested in 2024. A revolution in how machines have learned to interact with the world. Imagine you’d like a pair of robot arms installed in your home purely to do one thing: fold clothes. Check the fabric to figure out how much deformation it can tolerate before tearing. Move the gripper to the left sleeve, lift it, and fold it inward by exactly this distance. Quickly the number of rules explodes, but a complete accounting of them could produce reliable results.