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A marker of progress will be when Amazon converts to automated picking. They've been trying hard for almost a decade now. They had an annual competition for years. They have a decent picking robot developed in house.[1] It's not being deployed in quantity yet. Nor does it have anything like a humanoid hand. Just a two-surface gripper. Amazon's production robots are mostly automatic guided vehicles, not manipulators. I'm impressed with how far legged locomotion has come. But as yet, nobody seems to be using legged robots for any commercial purpose beyond the demo level. Is Tesla still going to produce vast numbers of humanoid robots by the end of 2026? There's been a lot of progress on the hardware side. Motor technology from drones has produced much better robot motors. The sweet spot on gear reduction seems to have been found. (Too much reduction, and you can't back drive. Too little, and the motors have to be too big.) The volumes are now large enough to justify making robot-specific components. Robot arms are much better than a decade ago. So are robot legs. Control is better, too. It looks like a humanoid robot will cost about as much as a car. But they're still not quite good enough to be useful. We'll know they are real when an Amazon Prime truck drives up and a robot does the last 100 meters of the delivery. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WStK9HNn8c8&
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That would only be a minor marker. A major marker would be whatever the Chinese equivalent(s) of Amazon are (Alibaba? etc.) going that route successfully. From academic / industrial conference presentations it appears Chinese services are banking on automation far more than an entity like Amazon does. That being said, I don't know what exact state the industrial automation technology is there and I can only extrapolate (or do websearch, which didn't lead to enough details; I only found things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnUGgc8R3ng). When something like https://www.allegrohand.com is mass produced and used industrially, I bet the last mile (meter?) would change a bit, and full automation would be easier and less finicky.
Why do we have the assumption that industrial robots need to have legs? The largest grocery store chain uses picker robots already - for building my orders, including fruit / vegetables (from boxes). They currently have humans filter the veggies and fruit prior to box setup, but a friend is working on the models to eliminate even that. Their robots do movement using sliding scale in 3D spaces (think poles that are left right, up and down, and the "picker" being able to glide and move. They currently have a ceiling slider that goes down and suctions things into a pneumatic tube to then end up in my grocery bag. IMHO it works pretty well - especially considering that delivery is ~$8 for me. Ultimately we're going to end up with several different types of robots, and not with a human centric vision. The question is if bipedal is a long term dead-end, and merely a short term method to fit into the world we currently have designed.
I worked at a warehouse a few years ago. Over lunch a manager bragged to me with some secret videos of experimental facilities. Semi-automated, and fully-automated. I don't know how far along they were though. But the intention was very clearly to get rid of all of us, as soon as physically possible. (Otherwise gran will switch to $competitor!)
> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WStK9HNn8c8& This video is so incorrect on so many levels. Thomas only releases the robots and at the end there is Bridget.
Yes, picking is one, and package delivery is another. I wonder how many people currently get package deliveries by robot? It might be a good metric to track?