This is Phoenix, Sanctuary AI's humanoid robot. Screenshot from Sanctuary AI's website.

John Koetsier

Will the home be the last place the humanoid robot gets a job? According to Sanctuary AI CEO James Wells, probably yes.

That’s a bit of a gut punch for those of us who want our clothes laundered, dishes done, floors cleaned, houses tidied and maybe even our meals made by robots with Genesis AI or Kyber Labs hands. Certainly 1X with its Neo robot and Figure are very interested in the idea that humanoid robots will soon be at work in our homes. Wells, however, isn’t buying it.

I caught up with James Wells at Web Summit Vancouver this week. Sanctuary is Canada’s only homegrown humanoid robotics company and holds what Wells says is the third-largest IP portfolio in the space globally. What Wells told me just might reframe much of the current humanoid hype cycle.

The home humanoid timeline: “three, five, maybe seven years”

1X, which just kicked off full-scale production of its humanoid robot Neo, is one of the robot makers that have explicitly targeted the home market. In fact, I know someone who has pre-ordered Neo, which is targeted to ship before the end of this year.

I asked Wells point-blank whether 1X's Neo, which is being pre-sold for home deployment now, is doomed.

He didn’t bite the way I expected. "I applaud their marketing initiative," he said, choosing his words with care. "Which is a marketing initiative."

Then he laid out Sanctuary’s internal ranking of deployment environments by viability: unit economics, environment complexity, customer sophistication, safety tolerance. By every axis, the home ranks last on Sanctuary AI’s list. Home gets there eventually, but Wells thinks humanoid robots are at least three to five years out for full commercial viability at performance and cycle times that customers will accept.

I happen to know that some humanoid robotics companies are already testing their robots in homes, and there are definitely some current challenges. Breakage is one, as is fall risk, especially in households with small pets or babies. A concern is something like turning an oven on and forgetting to turn it off.

“In the industrial world, you need to be 99.999% repeatable,” says Wells. “Most of these foundation models get you to about 80% performance. So you can do a lot of different things, but not that well. So you’re dropping a glass one out of five times.”

This gap — between viral demo and reliable operation over time — is the real gap keeping humanoid robots from showing up at scale in our homes.

That said: the rate of improvement is incredibly fast.

Great robotic hands: another key gating factor

Building great hands that work well and don’t break down is another key factor for success in the home as well as the factory.

“Hands are the gating factor for physical AI to proliferate into the world,” Wells says. “The holy grail continues to be dexterous manipulation across a wide range of tasks, but folks have gone kind of ground up versus top down, meaning: let’s figure out the legs part and mobility, which … when you talk to all the customers out there, there’s not a lot of commercial utility there.”

Translation: walking is sexy. The fully humanoid form factor is appealing. But it’s not where the value is for industry.

That’s not an isolated viewpoint.

It’s why Sonny, the humanoid-ish robot-in-training at Tutor Intelligence in Boston, has wheels, not legs. It’s more stable, more predictable, takes less energy, cheaper, simpler, longer-lasting and allows you to utilize more weight – including a battery – to make the entire platform more stable and to allow the robot more working time before a required recharge. Most experts I talk to say traditional robotic solutions, automation solutions and wheeled robotics are better options for factories and logistics facilities than humanoids.

But, let’s be honest, wheels can be hard in homes. I’m testing a new home vacuum right now and – guess what – it can’t navigate stairs. (In fact, despite being “multi-floor capable,” it gets confused when we carry it upstairs.) Although they’re not the only options for ascending and descending stairs, legs are one way to open up our entire homes for robots.

Hands, on the other hand, are what Sanctuary has specialized in since 2018.

Unlike most modern robot hands, Sanctuary AI’s are hydraulic: a super-contrarian bet. While almost the entire rest of the industry is going tendon-driven, electric-motor-actuated for hands, Sanctuary AI miniaturized hydraulic valves. They’re coin-sized, food-safe-oil-actuated and tested past two billion cycles without degradation. The company says they are 50x faster and 6x cheaper than off-the-shelf components and offer higher power density than electric motors.

“We have a unique capability with hydraulic hands that no one else in the world is doing, that has superior cycle life, speed, strength, robustness,” Wells says. “But our AI control system can control our humanoid, other humanoids, but also off the shelf hardware.”

The sovereign labor problem

All of which brought up another point: at some level, humanoid robots aren’t products. They are labor, and that means they are GDP.

I’m currently tracking pretty much every company, robot, investor, and funding round in the humanoid robot space, and the geographic concentration is stark: China leads, the U.S. is second, Japan, Germany, Korea and the UK are in the race, but both South America and Africa are not even in the game. Wells thinks robotics domination – both traditional and humanoid – is how China sees a path to push its share of global manufacturing from roughly 60% to 80%.

In fact, he recently talked with Canada’s first-ever minister of AI about it:

“If you do nothing, you will be forced to buy Chinese robots with AI brains that Canadian business will hire and you will hollow out the entire economy."

The same is true for the United States and pretty much any other modern industrial society.

Humanoid robots’ ChatGPT moment

The big question, whether for industry or home, is when we’ll see the iPhone moment in humanoid robots. Or, the ChatGPT moment: the point in time at which it becomes incredibly obvious that a massive phase shift in technology and capability is happening right now.

There may not just be one, Wells says:

"There’s going to be moments along the way," he said. "Task by task. Unlock a group of tasks, unlock another group of tasks."

The endgame is what researchers call zero-shot learning: a robot walks into a brand-new situation and immediately starts doing useful work. The bare facts are that we’re not there yet, and it’s unclear when we will be.

The reality is also, however, that we’re moving forward quickly.