Our world is adapted for humans, so humanoid robots will fit in most places. They might not be the best choice, but the universality has a good chance of making it worth it through economies of scale.
Building a custom robot that can stock shelves at a supermarket won't be worth it for a long time, but programming an existing humanoid platform might work. Find a couple hundred tasks like this (including household use), and that platform now has huge economies of scale.
Now, when you're starting a small factory, using the existing humanoids might make more sense than getting custom tooling, at least for some tasks. You'll often see factories where some tasks that could, in theory, be automated are left to humans because they're relatively small tasks and not worth automating with a custom machine. Humanoids could fill that gap.
> Building a custom robot that can stock shelves at a supermarket won't be worth it for a long time, but programming an existing humanoid platform might work.
This feels inverted to me, but perhaps I’m reading it wrong. A lot of the core challenges are shared, but the humanoid has to solve a bunch of additional challenges. Eg balancing is difficult with moving loads of various weights. Humanoids have to deal with that, while something more forklift-like practically opts out of that issue by just being designed with a high mass and low center of gravity.
I don’t see a universe where a humanoid is ever cheaper, but I could maybe see it generalizing well enough for usage to make it worth it. I’d still be a bit surprised, because operating costs would surely be higher (way more servos or hydraulics to fail, higher power usage hauling around unnecessary parts and weight).
This seems doubly true for factories where opex is so much more meaningful than capex. It’s worth spending $4M on custom tooling rather than $2M on generic tooling if it drops your opex by $500k/year on a factory with a 20 year lifespan.