TechPulse USA

By Daniel Rao The most honest sentence in humanoid robotics this year did not come from a robotics company. It came from its best customer — and it arrived in the same week that customer doubled its order. GXO Logistics, the world's largest pure-play contract logistics provider, announced on Monday, October 26, that it will deploy Agility Robotics' Digit humanoid robots at two more American warehouses: one in Statesville, North Carolina, and one in Lebanon, Tennessee, with operations starting in early 2027. It is the first expansion of the industry's first commercial humanoid deployment, and on paper it reads like a triumph. Digit has now moved more than 100,000 totes at GXO's original Georgia site. The robot works. The customer is buying more. Here is the awkward part. GXO's own chief executive told investors in August that the company has not achieved a return on investment from humanoids yet — and that it is, in his words, "a couple of years away...

Somewhere in a fulfillment center outside Columbus, Ohio, a squat orange robot is sliding beneath a shelf of goods right now, lifting it, and carrying it to a human picker who never walks more than a few steps. That scene, repeated across thousands of warehouses, hospitals, hotels, and airports, is the story behind the most important robotics statistic you have not heard yet: global shipments of professional service robots jumped 24 percent last year to nearly 250,000 units, according to the World Robotics 2026 – Service Robots report released today in Frankfurt by the International Federation of Robotics. "Service robots are expanding into everyday operations," said Jane Heffner, president of the International Federation of Robotics, in the report's release. The headline numbers describe a market that has crossed from pilot projects into commercial reality — and, buried in the data, a genuinely new development: about 7,000 full-size humanoid robots sold for real commer...