Humanoid Hype Dominates Top Robotics Stories of 2025

Usually, I start these annual highlights articles by saying that this was the best year ever for robotics. But this year, I’m not so sure. By the end of 2024, it really seemed like AI and humanoid robots were poised to make transformative strides toward some sort of practicality. While it’s true that progress has been made, it’s difficult to rationalize what actually happened in 2025 with the amount of money and hype that has permeated robotics over the year. And for better or worse, humanoids overshadow everything else, raising questions about what will happen if the companies building them fail.

We’ll approach 2026 with both optimism and skepticism, and we’ll continue to do what we always do: talk to experts, ask as many tough questions as possible, and make sure we share all cool robots, even (or especially) ones you won’t see anywhere else.

So thanks for reading, and to all of you awesome robotics people out there, thank you for sharing your work with us! IEEE Spectrum has a bunch of exciting new things planned for 2026, and as we close out 2025, here’s a quick look back at some of our best robotics stories of the year.

Eddie Guy

Humanoid robots are tough, and they’re tough in many different ways. For some of these ways, we at least understand the problems and what the solutions will likely entail. But there are other problems that don’t have clear solutions, and most humanoid companies, especially well-funded ones, seem quite happy to brush these problems aside while continuing to raise extraordinary amounts of money. We will continue to call it out every time we see it, and we expect even more skepticism in 2026.

CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Safety is one of those pesky little things that is extremely important in robotics, but that startup robotics companies usually treat as an afterthought because it doesn’t drive investment. Chinese manufacturer Unitree is really the only company that makes humanoid robots available and affordable enough for smart people to perform a security audit on them. And unsurprisingly, Unitree’s bots had serious vulnerabilities, not all of which have yet been fixed.

Amazon

What I like about the people at Amazon Robotics is their dedication to finding creative solutions to large-scale problems. Amazon simply doesn’t have time for fun and is designing robots to do what robots do best: specific repetitive tasks in structured environments. In today’s climate of hype around robotics, this is honestly refreshing.

Boston Dynamics

Did I mention that humanoid robots are tough? Whether or not anyone can keep the promises made about them (and personally, I’m leaning more and more strongly against doing so), progress East being designed for humanoids far more capable and versatile than they ever were. The collaboration between Toyota Research and Boston Dynamics on large behavioral models is just one example of how far we have come and how far we still have to go.

Lindsey Nicholson/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

My least favorite story happened at the end of the year: iRobot filed for bankruptcy. This wasn’t a complete surprise; Regulators halting an acquisition by Amazon in 2024 essentially gutted the company, and since then it has limped toward the inevitable. Right after the news broke, we spoke with Colin Angle, co-founder and former CEO of iRobot, who had a lot to share about what went wrong and what we can learn from it.

Evan Ackerman

My favorite story of 2025 was as much about cows as it was about robots. I was amazed to learn how many fully autonomous robots are hard at work on dairy farms around the world, and absolutely thrilled to also learn that these robots are actively improving the lives of dairy farmers and the dairy cows themselves. Dairy farming is endless, hard work, but thanks to these robots, small family farms are able to stay sustainable (and sane). Everyone wins, thanks to the robots.