If you've been doomscrolling lately, you might have noticed a surge in videos of humanoid robots doing backflips, pouring wine, or folding laundry. The implication, carefully cultivated by tech startups, is that the robot revolution has arrived and it's surprisingly good at housework. But according to a chorus of robotics researchers, the gap between a viral video and a reliably useful robot is roughly the size of the uncanny valley.
"People automatically extrapolate and assume that the robot that looks like a person can do all the things that a person who can dance could do - which is not true," said Jonathan Hurst, cofounder of Agility Robotics and a robotics researcher at Oregon State University. He notes that many startup companies "prey on" this tendency to anthropomorphize humanoid machines in order to raise a lot of money.
Sergey Levine, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley and cofounder of Physical Intelligence, points out that a single impressive demo doesn't prove generalization. "Maybe the robot can pour a glass of wine, but can it pour it out of any bottle and into any glass in any environment? That's actually a lot harder than having a robot do a backflip in one stage demo."
Dipam Patel, a PhD candidate at Purdue University, offers a skeptical checklist for viewers. First, unless explicitly stated, assume the robot is being teleoperated by a human. Second, check if the robot is in a familiar or novel environment. Third, watch the playback speed - companies often run videos at 2x or 4x speed because real robots are "very slow."
Finally, remember that viral demos are curated glimpses. The real measure of progress is "quantitative, large-scale evaluations" in real-world environments, which don't make for great TikTok content. So by all means, enjoy the robot doing parkour - just don't expect it to fold your laundry any time soon.