Artium Solos, founder and CEO of Humanoid, discusses the company’s plan to build and deploy industrial AI humanoid robots with its teams in Vancouver, Boston, and London.
Humanoid is developing both wheeled and bipedal robots, with industrial settings as its entry point because workflows there are relatively repeatable and deployments can scale across multiple robots. It is targeting material handling in retail, warehousing, logistics, automotive, and electronics, with higher-dexterity work such as assembly planned as capabilities advance. Solos says the company is partnering early with large firms that already face labor shortages.
Solos describes AI as a way for robots to learn from data and generalize, rather than requiring engineers to program each task individually. Humanoid uses vision-language-action models for manipulation and aims to build reusable capabilities that can support new tasks. The company says partial retraining takes under an hour or a few hours, while a full retrain takes less than 24 hours.
The development process starts with alpha prototypes in customer proof-of-concept projects, then uses performance measures to guide hardware and AI revisions. Humanoid plans to expand from single-robot proofs of concept to a multi-robot pilot in a live manufacturing facility within 12 months of the recording. The team is also bringing up its biped prototype, where balance, whole-body control, and lightweight leg design pose additional engineering challenges.
Humanoid presents Kinetik as an end-to-end fleet management system for coordinating robots, utilization, and downtime. Solos says industrial deployment requires robots to sequence behaviors, recover from problems, and hand off work when a unit needs charging. The company argues that fleet orchestration, alongside the robot itself, is central to commercial deployment.
Solos distinguishes the alpha phase, focused on customer feedback, from beta, which will address manufacturing, cost, reliability, and service. He reports six completed proof-of-concept projects and 30,000 non-binding pre-orders as of January. Humanoid planned to show a production-intent beta unit in Q3, begin low-rate production that quarter, and move toward revenue-generating units early the following year.
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