Signal A humanoid maker's founder predicts a market twice the size of the auto industry in 25 years

Summary

In a sidebar interview, Jonathan Hurst, robotics professor at Oregon State University and cofounder of Agility Robotics, predicts that the humanoid market will be twice the size of the automotive industry within 25 years. He acknowledges that this implies millions of robots, while only hundreds exist today. Reaching that scale, he argues, requires a functionally safe humanoid that no longer has to be confined to its own work cell. Only then can robots be deployed in the thousands, supported in the field and managed through fleet software that copes with constraints such as limited bandwidth. He points to Waymo's road deployments as proof that such scaling is feasible without new inventions, though it demands very capable execution. His company started from a practical task, lifting and moving heavy totes in semi-structured industrial spaces.