Is 2026 shaping up to be the year of the humanoid robot?

The concept of a human-shaped robot can be traced at least as far back as Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched a mechanical knight in his notebooks around 1495. And the vision has haunted our dreams and nightmares ever since. Robots, of course, are nothing new in factories and warehouses, even ones with human-styled arms, legs, heads and torsos. But they’re getting ever more sophisticated in the new world of physical artificial intelligence, and that’s what prompts Chris Matthieu to dub this “the year of the humanoid robot.” As vice president of developer ecosystem at RealSense, a maker of depth cameras and computer-vision systems for robotics, he’s seen huge progress in the field in recent months, causing him to declare that “we’re moving from programming robots to assigning them missions.” But is the human form really the best template for a robot in the industrial world? And why must these machines look like us, anyway? Are we experiencing a god complex — obsessed with creating things in our own image? Hosted by Bob Bowman, Editor-in-Chief with SupplyChainBrain.

Show notes:

A robotics case study with RealSense and Unitree.