He argues humanoids are better suited for domestic chores.
Agreed. Btw, “Agentic Robotics” is Specialist Robotics that uses the latest AI research.
Travis understands robotics far more than 99% of the robot startups here on X. “What if you had an industrial kitchen and needed to make 1000 pancakes an hour? I couldn’t think of a worse approach than a humanoid …”
Fixed industrial robots avoid the overhead of balance, locomotion, and multi-task adaptability that humanoids require, aligning with long-standing engineering practice for narrow, high-throughput jobs.
The same analysis suggests humanoids could handle low-volume domestic chores like cleaning and stair navigation where environments are unstructured and task variety is high, though no performance data backs the split yet.
Some users mocked the term 'agentic robotics' as marketing hype in discussions of robotics experts rejecting humanoids for industrial tasks.
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Surprisingly this is one of best concise but nuanced views on humanoid robots I'm aware of. And not so surprisingly one of the ones I most agree with. Thanks @travisk, for providing another good data point! Some of the humanoid bashing might be unneeded but it still entertains "Every humanoid demo or launch in recent memory usually starts with a humanoid dance show or martial arts display." 💃
.@travisk on humanoids. anyone who spends time actually commercializing robotics or autonomy understands this.
.@travisk on why specialized robots beat humanoids for real work: "I'm not anti-humanoid, I'm non-humanoid. There are tasks that are good for humanoids, low scale, high diversity, in human environments, humanoid all the way. But the minute you have a machine doing a high-scale task, we're no longer in humanoid land, we're in specialized robotics land." "There was a moment nine months ago where humanoids were the mega rage of all time. When your hairdresser says he's getting into the humanoid business, we know something's wrong." "If I had to make 1,000 pancakes an hour, I'd never have a humanoid do it, you'd need 100 humanoids going gg-gg-gg. It's like the humanoid Olympics in Beijing, they're doing the marathon and it's cool, but all I could think is, imagine if you put wheels on them. Would you ever put a humanoid in a car to drive it?" "High scale, repetitive tasks do not need to be in human form, and they won't be, because humans are meant to do lots of things at low scale."
Ken - can we get you to sign off on this definition or edit it? agentic robotics /ə-ˈjen-tik rō-ˈbä-tiks/ noun 1. Robotics that integrates autonomous AI agents to reason, plan, and act toward goals with minimal human intervention. 2. A marketing term used to describe nearly any robot released after large language models became popular. 3. “We added an LLM and a task planner - it’s agentic robotics now.”