The Ultimate Guide to Humanoid Robots

Humanoid robot demo videos have been convincing for a few years now. What's harder to find is a straight answer to which of these robots are actually working shifts in a real facility, versus which are still doing choreographed demos for investors. Here's a company-by-company look at where the leading humanoid robot makers actually stand in 2026.

Agility Robotics: the most operating hours of any humanoid

Agility's Digit robot has the most concrete deployment record in the industry: more than 65,000 operating hours logged across nine customer facilities, with named customers including GXO, Schaeffler, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and Mercado Libre. Agility says it can manufacture up to 10,000 units annually at full production capacity. That combination — real hours, named enterprise customers, and manufacturing scale already built — makes Agility the closest thing the industry has to a proven, working deployment rather than a pilot.

Figure AI: fewer hours, but a marquee automotive customer

Figure's robots have been deployed at BMW's Spartanburg plant, where the Figure 02 model completed an eleven-month pilot logging more than 1,250 operating hours and loading over 90,000 sheet metal parts. Figure has since moved its newer Figure 03 model into logistics sequencing work at the same facility. Figure hasn't published a total fleet unit count, but the BMW relationship — a real, named automotive manufacturer running a multi-month pilot — is one of the more credible enterprise validations in the industry, even at a smaller operating-hours scale than Agility.

The gap between Agility's 65,000-plus hours across nine facilities and Figure's roughly 1,250 hours at one plant is the clearest sign of how far apart "deployed" and "deploying" still are among humanoid robot makers in 2026.

Tesla Optimus: still mostly a promise

Tesla has never published a production count for Optimus, and as of mid-2026, Fremont production hadn't started in any meaningful volume — Elon Musk himself stated the robots weren't in usage in Tesla's own factories "in a material way." That's a notable gap between Optimus's public profile, built substantially on demo events and Musk's own commentary, and its actual deployment record, which as of this writing doesn't include a single named, operating customer facility outside Tesla's own experimentation.

Unitree: the volume and price leader, not the capability leader

Unitree has taken a different approach entirely: ship robots at real volume and low prices rather than chase marquee enterprise pilots. The company shipped roughly 5,500 units across its product lines in 2025 and is targeting 10,000 to 20,000 units in 2026, with its G1 model priced around $16,000 — a fraction of what Figure or Agility's hardware costs. Unitree was valued at $1.3 billion as of mid-2025. Its robots are generally viewed as less capable for complex industrial tasks than Figure's or Agility's, but the volume and price point make Unitree the company actually putting the most humanoid robots into the world right now, even if fewer of them are doing warehouse or factory work specifically.

What "deployed" actually means across these companies

The honest summary: Agility has the most real operating hours and named enterprise customers; Figure has a smaller but credible automotive pilot with a major manufacturer; Tesla has the most public attention and the least verifiable deployment; and Unitree has the most units in the world by a wide margin, aimed at a different, lower-capability price tier than the other three. None of that means Agility or Figure have "solved" humanoid robotics broadly — both companies' deployments remain a small fraction of the roles a general-purpose humanoid robot would eventually need to fill, a nuance covered in more depth in our look at what humanoid robots have actually shipped. But among the major players, the operating-hours and named-customer data are the clearest signal of who's actually working versus who's still demoing.

What to watch next

The most useful public metric for tracking real progress isn't a company's latest demo video — it's whether operating-hours and named-customer counts keep growing quarter over quarter, the way Agility's and Figure's have. A company that stops publishing those numbers, or that keeps a demo cadence without a growing deployment record behind it, is the pattern worth watching skeptically.