Answers
Answers
Concrete questions about robots, with short, verified, sourced answers. One question, one answer, zero filler.
- What is the cheapest humanoid robot? The cheapest complete humanoid with verifiable sales is the Unitree R1: from $5,900, 1.21 meters and 25 kilos, on sale since July 2025. Even cheaper models are announced (the Noetix Bumi runs about $1,400), but with real deployment still unproven. Three years ago, the cheapest humanoid cost $90,000.
- What is the fastest humanoid robot in the world? The certified world record belongs to the Unitree H1: 3.3 meters per second (7.4 mph), recognized by Guinness in March 2024 as the fastest full-size humanoid. For calibration: any amateur runner outsprints it, and Usain Bolt ran three times faster.
- How much does it cost to rent a humanoid robot? Nobody can give you a catalog price today: no humanoid maker publishes a rental rate. Agility (Digit), Apptronik (Apollo) and Figure deploy exclusively under robot-as-a-service contracts negotiated case by case with industrial partners, with no public figure. The most serious reference that exists is not a price but a consultancy projection: Roland Berger estimates a humanoid's operating cost (energy, software licensing, network, scheduled maintenance and depreciation) could fall to about $2 per hour at scale, a figure that excludes buying or leasing the robot itself. Any purchase figure you see today (roughly $250,000 per unit, per unconfirmed third-party estimates) reflects limited manufacturing, not mass production.
- How much does a robot teleoperator earn? In the United States, public job postings for robot operators (teleoperation and data collection) pay between $16 and $41 per hour according to job aggregators, with humanoid makers like Figure posting shift-based "Humanoid Robot Operator" roles. In Spain there are no public postings with visible pay yet: the job exists, the statistic doesn't.
- How many robots are there in the world? More than 4.28 million industrial robots work in the world's factories today, an all-time record according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). Service robots (vacuums, servers, logistics) are counted separately and sell by the millions every year, so the true total is far higher and nobody measures it precisely.
- How many robots does Amazon have? More than one million: Amazon deployed its 1,000,000th robot in July 2025, at a fulfillment center in Japan. It is the world's largest fleet of mobile industrial robots, spread across more than 300 facilities, and it is already approaching the size of Amazon's own human logistics workforce of roughly 1.2 million people.
- What is Helix, the brain of Figure's robots? Helix is the artificial intelligence model Figure trains in house to control its humanoid robots: a vision-language-action (VLA) model that turns what the cameras see and a natural-language instruction directly into movements. The first version (February 2025) was the first VLA for humanoids and controlled the upper body with two systems: one that understands the scene (7 billion parameters, about 7-9 times per second) and one that moves the body (80 million parameters, 200 times per second), all onboard the robot. Helix 02 (January 2026) jumped to full-body control with a single network from pixels to actuators, replacing 109,504 lines of hand-written C++ with a learned controller, and it is the system Figure's robots ran on while sorting packages for nearly 40 straight hours on a livestream.
- What is a VLA (vision-language-action) model? A vision-language-action (VLA) model is a neural network that joins the three things a robot needs to work: it sees the scene through its cameras, understands a natural-language instruction ("pick up the bag and put it on the belt") and directly produces the body's movements, with no engineer programming the task step by step. It is the same technological family as language models like ChatGPT, but with a different output: instead of generating the next word, it generates the next action. Since 2025 it is the architecture almost all humanoid robotics is converging on: Figure's Helix, Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics, NVIDIA's GR00T and Physical Intelligence's pi are VLA models.
- What AI do humanoid robots use? Humanoid robots do not run on a chatbot: their working brain is a vision-language-action (VLA) model that turns cameras and instructions into movements, and every maker has picked one of three routes. Train it in house: Figure with Helix and Tesla with Optimus's brain. Partner with an AI lab: Boston Dynamics put Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics inside its electric Atlas. Or buy it from a brain vendor: NVIDIA sells its open GR00T models and Physical Intelligence licenses its pi model to makers who only build the body. Language models like ChatGPT appear only in the conversation layer; the hard part, moving a body in the real world, is done by the VLA.
- Which country has the most robots? China, and it isn't close: it holds 1.8 million operational industrial robots, the only country in the world with such a stock, and installed 51% of all the planet's robots in a single year (276,288 units in 2023, per the IFR). In density (robots per 10,000 employees), the historic leader is South Korea.
- What does the word robot mean and who coined it? The word robot comes from the Czech robota, meaning forced labor or serfdom. Writer Karel Čapek introduced it in his play R.U.R. (1920), where mass-produced artificial workers end up rebelling. He didn't coin it himself: his brother, the painter Josef Čapek, suggested it to him.
- Who owns Unitree? Unitree Robotics is majority-controlled by its founder and CEO Wang Xingxing, who holds about a third of the company through direct and indirect stakes, alongside venture capital investors. Founded in Hangzhou in 2016, the company received approval in July 2026 to list on Shanghai's STAR Market at a valuation around 42 billion yuan (some $5.9 billion), so its ownership will open to the public with the debut.
- Who is Marc Raibert? Marc Raibert is the founder of Boston Dynamics and the father of dynamically balanced robots: MIT PhD in 1977, in 1980 he founded the Leg Lab at Carnegie Mellon (later moved to MIT), where he built the first robots that stayed upright by hopping, and in 1992 he created Boston Dynamics to commercialize that research. He stepped down as CEO in 2019 and since 2022 leads the RAI Institute, back in research; the company he founded is today 100% owned by Hyundai.
- Who invented the first industrial robot? George Devol, a self-taught American inventor, patented the first programmable industrial robot in the 1950s, and together with engineer Joseph Engelberger founded Unimation to build it. Their robot, the Unimate, went to work in 1961 at a General Motors plant in New Jersey, pulling scorching parts out of a die-casting machine.