Humanoids are a very intriguing path of robotics to me. Certainly, they are generally outclassed by specialised industrial robots in their areas, but because we design the environment around us, humanoids have the potential to be vastly more versatile.
In particular, on area I am hopeful on is rubbish sorting for recycling. With modern vision models + the dexterity of humanoid arms, it shouldn’t be too long until we can automate the sorting process, which would make large scale recycling dramatically more feasible and cost-effective.
They have potential to be very flexible and generally applicable. Another advantage is that you can repurpose them for different tasks. Specialized robots can do one thing well, but a humanoid can do one task one day, and another the next. So, you can have one pool of robots that gets deployed for different activities as the need arises. Another benefit is that you can have standardized parts for all your robots, making repair much cheaper and easier.
