The only thing I can think of are tasks that are so rarely done, it's not economical to build a robot for. But I then I also don't see how another robot solves this problem.
One can lift insane weights, has insane torque, and absurd precision, and can do the same movement millions of times with virtually no deviation. You program these with an exact movement plan, just like you would programm a CnC with a tool path. They are basically cnc machines.
The other one is a inacurate, unstable, dynamic system controlled by neural networks and heuristics. It has massive deviation over each run, but that means that the programming must be able to account for it. Which makes it suitable to operate on problems that are messy, unrepeatable and human-shaped.
A robot that has to be carefully adapted and set up for the task vs a robot that you can point at a task and have it figure out how to do it. A robot that doesn't deviate vs a robot that absorbs all kinds of deviations.
It's a bet that The Bitter Lesson will win over Moravec's Paradox, in the end.
If I were Hyundai, I'd be looking at this as buying a significant amount of vision, dynamics, and integration systems expertise, not necessarily the dream of self-motive walking systems.
That's exactly the reason why it's usually a bad idea to run a classical robot on a neural controller. If atlas bumps into something you get a small bump and maybe a broken atlas. Your average industrial robotic arm will happily yeet whatever it bumps into across the room.
B) there’s a long tail of individual tasks it’s uneconomical to build purpose-built robots for each individual task. But it’s economical to have 1 robot that can do all of them.
The point is, human shape plus general purpose intelligence is an amazing combination to resolve the “long tail”.
Without the intelligence part, the body is useless.
Perhaps Boston Dynamics has that part resolved now too.
Do they? A human can both chuck kilograms of stuff across a room or kick in a door, but then pick up a single hair off the ground, or feel and manipulate (things even lighter than) a literal feather.
Robots can certainly do things more repeatably, if not more precisely.
But the rest of the human body is not useful in a factory environment, so the arms could be mounted on a mobile base that does not have any resemblance to a human.
I dunno, a legged design is pretty useful for navigating complex environments. The arms and legs have to attach to something so you've still got some sort of torso. About the only thing you can easily do away with is the head I think.
But certainly a bipedal design seems unnecessarily complicated unless you need it to climb ladders inside narrow tubes or something similarly specific. I feel like a quadruped with 4+ arms mounted on top and many-jointed fingers might be ideal (both in terms of utility and also creepiness).
But of course the wheels could be replaced with feet where that's needed.
All you need to do is look at a recent video of car manufacturing process, and watch what the humans are doing.
Better than what? It seems that as long as they perform the tasks "better" (cheaper / faster / lower-error) than the humans that are currently performing them, that is an improvement for the factory owner.