https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X23jNzL3wuE
This commercial still holds a lot of spirit and heart to it. I really wish we could tap progress on the shoulder and ask for more forwards again...
They all have their own predecessors to things like NVIDIA Isaac used for things like worker toolpath planning or for absorbing worker height variances. They just don't use artificial robots with those systems, but use human laborers.
Anyone with even workshop level knowledge or experience in robotics knows we are minimum one whole decade away from humanoids building cars, let alone economically, and there's not going to be much first mover dominance advantages carrying over from doing pre-viability humanoids.
And so they just, keep raking in money from robotics assisted and hand built hybrid cars. Some more some less.
Humanoid robotics wasn't a hardware problem back then, and isn't a hardware problem today. It was, and is, an AI problem at its core. You can make a humanoid robot, but you can't make it do useful things.
This is what's changing today. AI tech is actually advancing enough that "useful humanoid robots" might be within reach.
It definitely still is a hardware problem today - humanoids force you to miniaturize gears, motors, and other parts (especially with the hands) which make them incredibly fragile and inaccurate. You're basically fighting against the laws of physics, so improvement on this front has been pretty slow. And tactile sensors which are key for complex manipulation tasks are still a far way to go in terms of resolution and reliability - so most robotics startups tend to rely on cameras for everything.
I think that in order to have humanoids that are actually capable of matching or exceeding the actual mechanical capability of humans, you need large advancements not just in AI but in material science as well - no machine can still match the efficiency of humans with its biological muscles, tendons, the skin / fat that surrounds them, and its vast array of sensory input.
The problem of today's robots isn't somehow "the hands are insufficiently dextrous". That isn't a capability bottleneck at all: the performance of modern robots isn't somehow limited by the fingers being too stiff or too brittle. The capability bottleneck is "the AI sucks ass". Robots underperform because the AI can't get them to perform to the limits of their hardware - or anywhere near, really.