The humanoid robotics industry has exploded in recent years, and consumers looking for evidence can look no further than at CES 2025 in Las Vegas.

Companies from as far as China and France or as close as the San Francisco Bay Area came to demonstrate their technology and showcase their robotics skills for attendees of the tech trade show.

Within the industry’s growth, companies are finding their marketplace, setting their respective goals for where their humanoid robots could best work out.

For Sunnyvale, California-based IntBot, co-founder David Yuan doesn’t see their robot Nylo in a factory or any major industry setting but in a personal human-robot environment.

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For that purpose, IntBot has had to find ways to develop a personality for Nylo and allow it to express itself creatively and colloquially, rather than stiffly and formally. In that spirit, the robot comes across at times as a bit snarky, almost like a teenager.

"You clearly are the most handsome.... You’re welcome, friend. It’s always a pleasure to hear the truth,” said Nylo to a CES visitor.

Yuan says they use AI multimodal language learning for Nylo and are trying to figure out all different aspects of human robot interaction.

“For example, body languages, facial expressions, eye contact, even micro expressions. Those are some things that people don't have the incentive to do, either in academia or in industries because we don't have a so-called qualitative benchmark of those aspects,” he said.

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Meanwhile, Bordeaux, France-based Pollen Robotics continues to focus on the engineering and producing of its humanoid robots.

After creating Reachy 1 in 2020 and selling about 100 robots globally since then, Pollen launched Reachy 2 in October 2024, says Mirasha Samantaray, Pollen’s business development manager.

They designed Reachy targeting researchers and other developers. They’ve made it into a robotics platform that’s easily adaptable for AI.

“With the data acquisition pipeline, you can use it to train AI modules. So it is AI ready and not generative AI, as we know today, with ChatGPT and everything but embodied AI, which will be used in the future for all of robotics. So it allows researchers to test their models in AI and also test their code in the traditional sense of training a robot,” Samantaray says.

Researchers and other humanoid robotics developers can personalize Reachy with their own changes, like adding hands with fingers instead of Pollen’s standard claws, or adding legs and making it a biped instead of Pollen’s wheels.

CES 2025, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, runs Jan. 7-10 and is used to debut products ranging from new automotive technology to quirky gadgets, as well showing new ways to use artificial intelligence.

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(Production: Nathan Frandino)