Humanoid robots have been doing paid work in factories since June 2024, when Agility Robotics put a Digit into a GXO site in Georgia lifting totes onto conveyors. That single deployment has since moved over 100,000 totes, and the wider evidence follows the same pattern. BMW, Schaeffler and Toyota Canada all have machines doing real handling work on production floors.
Every one of those deployments sits inside a large manufacturer running a joint programme with a supplier. None of them is a plant that bought a robot and installed it, and that gap is the actual question a UK manufacturing SME needs answered before spending anything.
The gap comes down to three things: whether the work stays in one place, whether the part stays the same, and whether the workspace could be changed more cheaply than the robot costs. Where any of those is true, a cobot or a fixed cell wins on cost and uptime, and no legged machine is worth considering. The harder constraint is structural rather than commercial. No UK machinery standard yet covers how a robot that has to be actively held upright should fail safe, and the standard in development is not published.
We have written up the full picture, along with a twelve-question readiness scorecard that most plants do not yet hold the data to answer honestly.
