Famed roboticist and iRobot founder Rodney Brooks has sounded the alarm on a humanoid robot investment bubble. He’s not the only one.
In a recent essay, Brooks calls out the billions of venture dollars being poured into humanoid robot companies like Figure. His take: despite the amount of money being injected into the industry, humanoids won’t be able to learn dexterity — or the fine motor movements with hands– rendering them essentially useless.
His take might surprise some, especially those VCs investing in the sector. But not to the multiple robotics-focused VCs and AI scientists, who have told TechCrunch in recent months that they don’t expect to see wide adoption of humanoid robots for at least a few years — if not more than a decade.
The issues
Fady Saad, a general partner at robotics-focused VC Cybernetix Ventures and former co-founder of MassRobotics, told TechCrunch that beyond sending humanoids into space in place of human astronauts, he doesn’t see a huge market yet.
“People who probably haven’t seen humanoids before, or haven’t kind of been closely following what’s happening, they are impressed with what’s happening now in humanoids, but we continue to be a little bit conservative and skeptical about the actual use case and the actual revenues that will be generated,” Saad said.
Saad is also concerned about safety, especially when humans and humanoid robots share the same space. Safety issues could arise from humanoids and humans working closely on a factory floor, or other industrial sites. Saad says those concerns mount when humanoids enter people’s homes — a goal many humanoid companies are working toward.
“If this thing falls on pets or kids, it will hurt them,” Saad said. “This is just one aspect of a big hurdle that no one is paying attention to, or very few people are paying attention to. The other thing is, how many people are comfortable with having a humanoid in their home sitting there? What if it got hacked? What if it went crazy at night and started breaking things?”
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