what is a humanoid robot?

Its promise is economic: a human-shaped robot could, in theory, do any human job without remodeling the factory or the home. Its 2026 reality is more modest: the most famous one, the Tesla Optimus, walks autonomously but chatted teleoperated in its most viral demo, and the pattern repeats across the category, as we document in the demos that weren’t what they seemed.

The honest rule for reading this category: always ask who decides, because many humanoids 'at work' are well-filmed teleoperation. The contenders and their verdicts, in our humanoid comparison.