Everyone talks about humanoids. What do robotics companies actually build?

Two bets on the future of robots are being placed at once. Tesla is preparing to build humanoids on a large scale, and Chinese makers ship them by the thousand: AgiBot alone shipped 8,400 in the first half of 2026. Meanwhile Travis Kalanick, who founded Uber, raised $1.7 billion for Atoms — robots built on a common wheelbase, and deliberately not humanoid. The pictures are all of humanoids. We wanted to know what the rest of robotics is doing, in three records: what companies say they build, what gets patented, and what researchers publish.

Of the 572 organisations whose own description we could read, 36 describe a humanoid. 124 describe mobile robots — the carts and shuttles that move goods through warehouses and hospitals — and 96 arms. 211 describe no particular robot at all: software, sensors, parts, services. Our list leans towards the companies that call themselves robotics companies, and the reading is a machine’s. Even so, the humanoid is one form among many, and not the largest.

Patents tell the same story more loudly. US grants for legged and walking robots, the class a humanoid’s legs fall into, went from 42 in 2015 to 95 in 2025. Grants for arms and grippers went from 940 to 3,132; for self-driving control from 824 to 2,902. A humanoid is a body on top of arms, hands and control; its patents may sit in those classes too. But the growth of robotics’ protected inventions is in hands and in machines that move themselves, not in legs.

Legs and humanoids are a small share of robotics, but inside it the race has a clear leader. Of the worldwide legged-robot patent families the humanoid makers we follow filed since 2020, 84% are Chinese, 14% American; the makers filing most are UBTECH Robotics, Boston Dynamics and XPENG Robotics. In research the same order holds: 29% of the legged-and-humanoid papers of 2020–2024 are Chinese by fractional credit, 17% American. So the humanoid is a small bet for robotics as a whole, and a Chinese one. The press’s favourites — Tesla, Figure, 1X — file far less than their fame; our records, which lag the news, show where inventions are made, not where robots are sold.

In research, legs are a small field and a shrinking share: the area of legged locomotion and humanoids held 2.9% of placed robotics papers in 2014 and 2.1% in 2025, while autonomous driving rose from 6.4% to 10.1%. So the humanoid is the picture, and the arm, the cart and the self-driving machine are the business — in what companies say, what they patent and what researchers publish. That may change fast: Chinese makers ship faster than our lagging records can show. Our collection of Chinese makers and trade shows has now landed: another source knows 27 of the 33 makers on our list, and 125 of the 313 exhibitors at Beijing’s latest World Robot Conference.