Three major humanoid robotics companies announced milestone achievements within days of each other, signaling intensifying competition in the sector. Figure AI reported successful task completion in unfamiliar home environments, Boston Dynamics unveiled a new training facility within a major automotive plant, and Unitree launched an advanced robotic hand.
Figure AI conducted tests of its 173 cm tall, 61-kilogram Figure 03 robot in 30 Bay Area homes it had never encountered. Across 420 attempts at simple tasks including tidying living rooms, folding towels, and making beds, the robot succeeded 56% of the time without any prior data collection or on-site tuning. A control model trained without Figure's proprietary Index dataset achieved only 9% success, underscoring the value of the company's crowdsourced training library. Figure reports the Index, which consists of human-behavior videos, grows by approximately 35 minutes of footage every second.
Boston Dynamics opened its Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group's facility outside Savannah, Georgia, where Atlas humanoids will train on sorting and sequencing automotive parts. Hyundai stated plans to deploy 25,000 Atlas units across its and Kia's plants over the coming years and to construct a U.S. factory capable of producing up to 30,000 robots annually by 2028. Boston Dynamics described the center as a "Robot Behavior Factory" designed to generate high-quality training data, with robots not expected to perform component assembly until 2030.
Unitree introduced the Dex5-S, a 22-degree-of-freedom robotic hand priced starting at $6,500 before tax and shipping. The hand is sized to match human proportions and features backdrivability across all joints, allowing it to yield to external force.
Market data shows Chinese manufacturers dominated global humanoid robot shipments, accounting for over 97% of approximately 19,100 units. AgiBot led the market in the first half of 2026 with roughly 8,400 units and 44% market share, followed by Unitree at approximately 5,900 units and 31% share. AgiBot and Unitree combined represent roughly 75% of global shipments, with the remaining 25% distributed among other Chinese firms and American competitors including Tesla, Figure AI, and Agility Robotics.
Figure committed $3.5 billion of compute through a partnership with Nscale, with potential to scale beyond $6 billion, to support continued training of its Helix software platform.
