Field guide
Humanoid Robots in 2026: What Is Actually Available, Piloting, or Deployed?
An evidence-based comparison of Digit, Apollo, Atlas, Figure, Phoenix, NEO, Unitree G1, and H1—separating announcements and demonstrations from pilots, sales, and production deployments.
Executive summary
Only a small subset of humanoid robots has crossed from compelling demonstration to documented, recurring work. Based on primary-source evidence available through July 11, 2026, Agility Robotics’ Digit has the clearest ongoing commercial logistics deployment in this comparison: Agility says Digit entered a multi-year commercial operation at GXO in June 2024 and later passed 100,000 totes moved at the facility (Agility Robotics). Figure reports that Figure 02 ran on an active BMW assembly line every working day, accumulated more than 1,250 hours, and contributed to production of more than 30,000 vehicles before Figure retired that generation (Figure).
Boston Dynamics moved Atlas into a new phase in January 2026: it unveiled the product version, said manufacturing would begin immediately, and said all 2026 deployments were committed to Hyundai and Google DeepMind (Boston Dynamics). That is stronger than a research demonstration, but scheduled shipments are not the same evidence as completed production work.
Apptronik Apollo, Sanctuary AI Phoenix, and the latest Figure 03 have customer or partner activity, but their public evidence varies by workflow and phase. 1X accepts orders for NEO and says early deliveries start in 2026; this makes NEO orderable, not yet proven as a broadly deployed home product (1X). Unitree openly lists G1 with a starting price, making it the clearest off-the-shelf purchase in this group, but Unitree’s product page does not document a named production deployment (Unitree). H1 is presented as a product and developer platform, while public production-use evidence remains limited on its official product page (Unitree).
This guide uses five evidence labels. They are intentionally not a maturity ranking: a commercially sold research platform and a production logistics robot serve different buyers.
| Label | What it means in this guide | What it does not prove |
|---|---|---|
| Announced | The developer has publicly introduced the robot or generation. | A working system, customer access, or repeatability. |
| Demonstrated | The robot has been shown performing a task in public or company-published evidence. | Unedited operation, low intervention, or commercial readiness. |
| Piloting | A customer or partner is evaluating the robot in a real operating environment. | Routine production use or open availability. |
| Commercially available | A buyer can order, buy, lease, or contract for the robot, even if access is limited. | Immediate delivery, broad availability, or production performance. |
| Production deployed | The robot performs a regular operational workflow, supported by concrete deployment evidence. | General autonomy across tasks or environments. |
Key takeaways
- Digit and the now-retired Figure 02 have the strongest published production evidence. Agility documents an ongoing commercial GXO operation and throughput; Figure documents an 11-month BMW program that reached daily assembly-line work (Agility, Figure).
- Atlas became a manufactured product in 2026, but its announced 2026 customer shipments should not be rewritten as completed deployments. Boston Dynamics says the allocation is committed and identifies Hyundai and Google DeepMind as scheduled recipients (Boston Dynamics).
- “Available” has several meanings. G1 has a public starting price; NEO can be ordered for future delivery; Digit is contracted through enterprise deployments; other platforms are accessed through selected partnerships.
- Autonomy is task-bounded. Company sources describe autonomous navigation, manipulation, charging, or learned policies, not a robot that can independently perform any human task.
- Teleoperation disclosure is inconsistent. 1X explicitly offers remote expert guidance for unfamiliar NEO chores and says Redwood learns from teleoperated and autonomous episodes (1X, 1X). For several other deployments, intervention and remote-assistance rates are not publicly disclosed.
- A company saying “commercial” is not enough by itself. This guide looks for an ordering path, a contract, named customer activity, recurring operation, runtime, or throughput.
2026 comparison: status and availability
Status reflects the latest primary-source evidence reviewed on July 11, 2026.
| Robot | Developer | First announced | Latest evidenced status | Commercial availability | Strongest evidence class |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Digit | Agility Robotics | February 19, 2019 (source) | Commercial GXO operation; Agility reports 100,000+ totes moved (source) | Enterprise contracts / robotics-as-a-service; not an open retail listing | Production deployed |
| Apollo / Apollo 2 | Apptronik | August 23, 2023 (source) | Customer evaluation and industrial partnership activity; Apollo 2 is the current platform (source) | Partner-led commercial engagement; no public retail price or standard delivery schedule | Piloting |
| Atlas, electric/product generation | Boston Dynamics | Electric Atlas unveiled April 2024 (source); product version January 5, 2026 (source) | Manufacturing announced; 2026 fleets scheduled for Hyundai and Google DeepMind | 2026 allocation committed to selected partners; broader customers planned for 2027 | Commercially allocated; deployment scheduled |
| Figure 03 | Figure | October 9, 2025 (source) | Figure reports 350+ units built and a Figure 03 BMW workflow demonstration in June 2026 (production, BMW) | Selected commercial programs; no open sales channel | Demonstrated / partner evaluation |
| Phoenix, generation 7 | Sanctuary AI | Phoenix unveiled May 2023 (source) | Seventh generation demonstrated with updated hardware and Carbon AI (source) | Commercial inquiries and partner programs; no public retail offer | Demonstrated; commercial programs disclosed |
| NEO | 1X | Consumer NEO launched October 28, 2025 (source) | Orders accepted; early-owner capabilities and expert assistance described | Orderable for initial 2026 delivery, according to 1X; broad fulfillment not yet evidenced | Commercially orderable / pre-delivery |
| G1 | Unitree | Introduced in 2024; current primary product page reviewed (source) | Product listed with configurations and a starting price | Public starting price of US$13,500; shipping terms and capabilities depend on configuration | Commercially available |
| H1 / H1-2 | Unitree | Introduced in 2023; current product family page reviewed (source) | Product family marketed with specifications and autonomous locomotion claims | Commercial inquiry/product channel; no standard price shown on the cited page | Commercially available |
Important limitation: “No public evidence found” means exactly that. It is not proof that a capability, customer, intervention, or shipment does not exist.
Capability and operating-model comparison
| Robot | Target use cases | Public autonomy evidence | Teleoperation or human involvement | Public AI / software stack | Notable partnerships |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Digit | Tote handling and material movement in logistics and manufacturing | Agility describes full-stack indoor navigation without pre-mapping and Arc fleet/workflow management (navigation, Arc) | Human intervention rate for the GXO deployment is not publicly stated in the cited deployment reports | Agility autonomy stack plus Agility Arc; model-level details are limited publicly | GXO; Agility also publicly lists other enterprise agreements, but GXO has the strongest production evidence here |
| Apollo 2 | Manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and material handling | Apptronik describes autonomous action, reasoning, dexterous manipulation, and a platform designed for robotics foundation models (Apollo 2) | Public sources reviewed do not quantify teleoperation or intervention in customer trials | Apptronik hardware/software with Google DeepMind Gemini Robotics work referenced by Apptronik (Apollo 2) | Mercedes-Benz manufacturing pilot (source); Google DeepMind collaboration referenced on Apollo 2 page |
| Atlas | Industrial material handling, order fulfillment, and automotive work | Boston Dynamics says Atlas can work autonomously with minimal supervision, self-swap batteries, and distribute learned tasks across a fleet (product page) | Teleoperation and intervention metrics for planned customer deployments are not disclosed in the cited sources | Boston Dynamics controls and Orbit integration; new AI foundation-model training with Google DeepMind announced (launch) | Hyundai and Google DeepMind are the named 2026 recipients |
| Figure 03 | Manufacturing/logistics now; home tasks are a stated design target | Figure describes Helix as a vision-language-action system and Helix 02 as whole-body “pixels-to-actions” control (Helix, BMW) | Helix training uses human demonstration data; current BMW intervention metrics for Figure 03 are not disclosed | Proprietary Helix VLA; Figure says it runs onboard embedded GPUs (source) | BMW; Figure 02 supplied the clearest completed production evidence before retirement |
| Phoenix | Varied workplace tasks requiring dexterous hands and human-like manipulation | Sanctuary says Carbon combines natural-language translation, reasoning, planning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning (Phoenix) | Sanctuary describes Phoenix as a human-behavior data-capture system; current remote-operation and intervention rates are not quantified in the cited sources | Carbon cognitive architecture and software platform | Customer deployments and industry programs are described by Sanctuary, but the reviewed current sources do not provide a public ordering path or production KPI comparable with GXO/BMW |
| NEO | Household chores, object retrieval, organization, conversation, and assistance | 1X says NEO can navigate and perform basic tasks autonomously; Redwood is an onboard vision-language transformer for mobile manipulation (NEO, Redwood) | Owners can schedule a “1X Expert” to guide NEO through an unknown task; Redwood training includes teleoperated and autonomous episodes (NEO, Redwood) | Redwood VLA, diffusion-policy action decoding, onboard embedded GPU; NEO also includes a conversational LLM | Early-owner home program; named broad production deployments are not presented on the cited launch page |
| G1 | Research, education, development, manipulation, and embodied-AI experimentation | Unitree lists imitation learning, reinforcement learning, OTA updates, optional dexterous hands, and its UnifoLM model direction (G1) | The product page does not quantify teleoperation, autonomous-task duration, or intervention | Unitree software/SDK ecosystem and UnifoLM references; capabilities vary between G1 and G1 EDU | No named production customer is needed to establish product availability, but none is documented on the cited product page |
| H1 / H1-2 | Full-size humanoid research, mobility development, and general-purpose experimentation | Unitree says H1 can walk and run autonomously in complex terrain and lists lidar/depth sensing (H1) | Teleoperation and task-intervention evidence are not disclosed on the cited product page | Unitree control stack and sensors; no task-general foundation model is specified on the cited H1 page | No named production deployment is documented on the cited product page |
Robot-by-robot evidence review
Agility Robotics Digit: production deployed
Agility unveiled Digit on February 19, 2019, initially describing last-mile logistics, box handling, stair climbing, and an API for onboard or wireless control (Agility). The commercial evidence is now much stronger than that early announcement.
Agility says Digit began commercial operation at a GXO facility near Atlanta on June 5, 2024, under a multi-year agreement (Agility). In November 2025, Agility reported that Digit had moved more than 100,000 totes at GXO’s Flowery Branch facility and described multiple tote-handling workflows (Agility). These are concrete throughput and duration signals, although the source is the vendor rather than an independent audit.
Digit’s public autonomy evidence includes indoor navigation without pre-mapping, stopping for unexpected obstacles, and resuming after they clear (Agility). Agility Arc supplies facility mapping, workflow definition, robot status, uptime, throughput, incident metrics, and integration APIs (Agility). The cited GXO reports do not publish a human-intervention rate, so this guide does not infer one.
Verdict: production deployed for a bounded logistics workflow; enterprise commercial access rather than retail availability.
Apptronik Apollo: piloting with industrial partners
Apptronik unveiled Apollo on August 23, 2023 and identified warehouses and manufacturing plants as near-term environments (Apptronik). Its current Apollo 2 page describes bipedal and wheeled configurations, dexterous manipulation, swappable batteries, speech/listening features, and a platform designed to pair with embodied-AI models (Apptronik).
In March 2024, Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz announced an agreement to pilot Apollo in manufacturing facilities. The stated candidate workflows included delivering assembly kits, inspecting components, and moving totes of kitted parts (Apptronik). The announcement called this Apptronik’s first publicly announced commercial deployment, but also explicitly described the activity as a pilot. This guide therefore classifies the evidence as piloting, not proven production deployment.
Apptronik says its Google DeepMind work connects Apollo with Gemini Robotics and describes Apollo 2 in terms of autonomous action and reasoning (Apptronik). The source does not publish customer-trial intervention rates or a standard public price and delivery schedule.
Verdict: industrial pilots and commercial partnerships; no open retail availability or source-backed recurring production KPI in the reviewed evidence.
Boston Dynamics Atlas: manufactured product, deployments scheduled
Boston Dynamics unveiled the fully electric Atlas in April 2024 as a system intended for real-world industrial applications, beginning with testing at Hyundai (Boston Dynamics). On January 5, 2026, it unveiled the product version and said manufacturing would begin immediately (Boston Dynamics).
The 2026 announcement says all Atlas deployments for the year were committed, with fleets scheduled to ship to Hyundai’s Robotics Metaplant Application Center and Google DeepMind, and additional customers planned for 2027 (Boston Dynamics). Because the source uses future shipment language, this guide records commercial allocation and scheduled deployment, not completed production deployment.
Boston Dynamics says the product can perform industrial material handling with minimal supervision, self-swap its battery, connect to MES and WMS systems through Orbit, and distribute a learned task across a fleet (Atlas product page). The company also says Atlas will use new AI foundation models developed with Google DeepMind (launch announcement). Public teleoperation and intervention metrics are not provided in these sources.
Verdict: a real manufactured product with committed partner allocations; production results should be updated after recipient operations are documented.
Figure 03: scaled manufacturing, partner demonstration; Figure 02 had production evidence
Figure introduced Figure 03 on October 9, 2025, describing a redesign around its Helix AI system, home use, and higher-volume manufacturing (Figure). In April 2026, Figure said it had produced more than 350 Figure 03 robots and had demonstrated a production rate of one robot per hour at its BotQ facility (Figure). Manufacturing robots is not the same as deploying them at customer sites, so those numbers are evidence of production capacity—not customer production work.
Figure 03 arrived at BMW Plant Spartanburg for a sequencing workflow demonstrated in June 2026. Figure says Helix 02 coordinated hands, arms, torso, and feet for picking parts and pulling a cart (Figure). The source calls this the first demonstration of Figure 03 performing the workflow; it does not provide recurring runtime or intervention metrics. We classify Figure 03 as demonstrated in a partner environment, not yet production deployed on that evidence.
The predecessor has stronger evidence. Figure says Figure 02 spent 11 months at BMW, reached daily operation on an active assembly line, ran more than 1,250 hours, loaded more than 90,000 parts, and contributed to more than 30,000 X3 vehicles before retirement (Figure). These are vendor-reported figures, but they support a production-deployment label for Figure 02.
Helix is Figure’s proprietary vision-language-action model. Figure says it controls the upper body at high frequency, uses one set of neural-network weights across behaviors, and runs onboard embedded GPUs (Figure). Figure does not disclose a public purchase price or general ordering path.
Verdict: Figure 02 achieved documented production work and is retired; Figure 03 is in scaled internal production with a demonstrated BMW workflow, but current recurring customer production evidence remains incomplete.
Sanctuary AI Phoenix: demonstrated platform with commercial programs
Sanctuary AI unveiled the sixth-generation Phoenix in May 2023 with Carbon, its AI control system (Sanctuary AI). The company describes Carbon as combining natural-language interpretation, reasoning and motion planning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. It also reported that its technology had completed hundreds of task types identified by customers across more than a dozen industries (Sanctuary AI). Those are company-reported capability counts, not proof that hundreds of tasks run autonomously in production.
Sanctuary later introduced a seventh-generation Phoenix with changes to motion range, uptime, sensing, durability, build time, and task-automation speed (Sanctuary AI). The company described this robot as an important human-behavior data-capture system. The cited sources do not provide a current open ordering path, deployment-level intervention rate, or recurring customer throughput comparable with Digit or Figure 02.
Verdict: demonstrated, commercially oriented technology with customer programs; present production status cannot be established from the reviewed primary evidence.
1X NEO: orderable for homes, with explicit expert assistance
1X introduced NEO Gamma on February 21, 2025 as a home-development platform and described internal home testing as a step toward autonomous humanoids (1X). It launched the consumer NEO product on October 28, 2025 and opened ordering for initial delivery plans in 2026 (1X).
The launch page says NEO will arrive with basic abilities including navigation, object retrieval, opening doors, and turning off lights. Crucially, 1X also says owners can schedule a 1X Expert to guide the robot through a chore it does not yet know (1X). That disclosure means readers should not assume every showcased household task is autonomously executed end-to-end.
Redwood, 1X’s vision-language transformer, runs onboard and controls mobile manipulation through a diffusion policy. 1X says its training data includes both teleoperated and autonomous episodes from EVE and NEO (1X).
Verdict: commercially orderable with 2026 delivery plans, but broad fulfillment and routine household production use remain unproven. Human expert guidance is explicitly part of the operating model for unknown tasks.
Unitree G1: the clearest publicly priced platform
Unitree’s current G1 page lists a starting price of US$13,500, distinguishes G1 and G1 EDU configurations, and describes optional dexterous hands, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and continuous software updates (Unitree). That public product and price information supports a commercially available classification.
It does not establish that a base-price G1 includes every capability shown on the page, nor does it establish autonomous production deployment. Configuration, support, shipping, export, and developer-access details should be confirmed with Unitree before purchase. The cited page does not publish task-level autonomy duration, intervention rates, or a named production customer.
Verdict: commercially available as a product/development platform; no source-backed production deployment identified on the official product page.
Unitree H1 and H1-2: commercial full-size platforms, limited deployment evidence
Unitree presents H1 and H1-2 as full-size humanoid products and publishes hardware specifications, lidar/depth sensing, mobility details, and a claim that H1 can walk and run autonomously in complex terrain (Unitree). Locomotion autonomy should not be confused with autonomous completion of useful work: the product page does not document a recurring customer task, intervention rate, or production KPI.
The page provides a commercial contact/product path but no standard public price in the cited material. It also does not specify teleoperation involvement or a task-general AI stack for deployed work.
Verdict: commercially available product family, primarily evidenced as a mobility and development platform rather than a documented production worker.
Timeline: from announcements to operating evidence
| Date | Event | Evidence significance |
|---|---|---|
| February 19, 2019 | Agility unveils Digit (source) | Announcement; early deliveries were planned for 2020. |
| May 2023 | Sanctuary AI unveils Phoenix (source) | Demonstrated humanoid and Carbon architecture. |
| August 23, 2023 | Apptronik unveils Apollo (source) | Announcement focused on industrial work. |
| 2023 | Unitree introduces the H1 family (current source) | Commercial development platform; exact launch evidence should be preserved in a future archival update. |
| March 15, 2024 | Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz announce Apollo pilot agreement (source) | Named customer pilot, not proof of recurring production. |
| April 2024 | Boston Dynamics unveils electric Atlas (source) | Product-intent announcement and Hyundai testing plan. |
| 2024 | Unitree introduces G1 (current source) | Publicly priced platform; exact launch evidence should be preserved in a future archival update. |
| June 5, 2024 | Digit begins GXO commercial operation, according to Agility (source) | Production-deployment evidence. |
| February 20–21, 2025 | Figure introduces Helix; 1X introduces NEO Gamma (Figure, 1X) | New model/control-stack evidence. |
| October 9, 2025 | Figure introduces Figure 03 (source) | New hardware generation. |
| October 28, 2025 | 1X opens NEO ordering (source) | Orderable for planned 2026 delivery, not deployed evidence. |
| November 2025 | Figure reports Figure 02 BMW results; Agility reports 100,000+ totes at GXO (Figure, Agility) | Strongest operating evidence in this comparison. |
| January 5, 2026 | Boston Dynamics unveils product Atlas and names scheduled 2026 recipients (source) | Manufacturing and committed allocation; deployments still scheduled. |
| April–June 2026 | Figure reports 350+ Figure 03 units produced and demonstrates Figure 03 at BMW (production, BMW) | Manufacturing scale plus partner demonstration; recurring customer operation not yet shown. |
How to read humanoid-robot claims
A useful status check asks six questions:
- Can a buyer obtain the robot? Look for a price, order page, contract, lease, or named commercial program.
- Did the robot work at a customer site? A lab video and customer-site pilot are different evidence.
- Was it part of routine operations? Look for shifts, dates, runtime, throughput, uptime, and workflow integration.
- How much help did it receive? Seek teleoperation, intervention, reset, supervision, and recovery data.
- What exactly was autonomous? Navigation autonomy, grasp autonomy, and end-to-end task autonomy are not interchangeable.
- Who reported the result? All robot-specific facts in this guide use primary sources, but most performance evidence is vendor-reported and should be read accordingly.
For the underlying concepts, see What Is Physical AI?, the Humanoid Robots topic briefing, Embodied AI, and Robot Foundation Models. Definitions for autonomy, degrees of freedom, foundation model, pilot, teleoperation, and whole-body control are available in the Physical AI glossary.
What this guide will update next
This is a living reference. The next evidence that could change the classifications includes completed Atlas shipments and customer runtime, recurring Figure 03 production metrics at BMW, Apollo customer operating data, NEO delivery and owner-use evidence, Phoenix intervention data, and named Unitree production workflows. Corrections and additional primary evidence can be sent through the contact page under the site’s editorial policy.
Frequently asked questions
Which humanoid robots are commercially available in 2026?
Unitree lists the G1 with a starting price, while Agility sells Digit through commercial agreements and robotics-as-a-service deployments. 1X accepts orders for NEO with initial 2026 delivery plans, but ordering a future unit is not the same as a proven production deployment. Atlas's 2026 allocation is committed to selected partners, and Apollo, Figure 03, and Phoenix are partner-led rather than open retail products.
Which humanoid robot is actually working in production?
The strongest public production evidence in this comparison comes from Digit at GXO and Figure 02 at BMW. Agility reports a multi-year commercial operation and more than 100,000 totes moved. Figure reports that Figure 02 ran on an active BMW assembly line every working day before that generation was retired for Figure 03.
Does a demonstration prove autonomous operation?
No. A demonstration can establish that a behavior occurred, but not its intervention rate, repeatability, operating hours, or commercial readiness. Unless a primary source explains autonomy and human involvement, this guide labels those details undisclosed.
Are humanoid robots fully autonomous in 2026?
No platform in this comparison should be understood as universally autonomous. Companies report autonomous capabilities for bounded tasks, while human demonstrations, teleoperation, supervision, workflow integration, and recovery processes remain part of development or operation to varying and often undisclosed degrees.
What is the difference between piloting and production deployed?
A pilot evaluates a robot in a customer environment with limited scope. Production deployment means the robot performs an operational workflow as part of regular production or logistics work, supported by evidence such as recurring shifts, runtime, throughput, or a long-term commercial agreement.