Humanoid robots appear in some homes and workplaces as investment booms – A frenzy of investment has created a crowd of new human-like designs.

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A trio of six-foot-tall machines with ostrichlike legs and two jointed arms work in shifts, walking off a charging rack to move boxes between two conveyor belts until it’s time to plug in again.

This vision of the future of labor is a test station at the end of an assembly line for building humanoid robots designed to fill jobs in warehouses and auto plants. Human engineers nearby watch for mistakes as the machines are put through their paces.

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Academic and corporate workshops have built humanoid robots for decades, but they have largely been oddities, not productive workers. Putting machines on two legs instead of wheels or a fixed base introduces a host of engineering and safety problems, limiting how much they can lift and increasing the risk of falling onto nearby humans.

Now, advancements in robotics that make humanoid designs more capable and affordable are combining with the surge of investment in artificial intelligence to create a new drive to make humanoid robots practical.

Years of steady progress have made legged robots better at balancing and stepping through tricky terrain. Improved batteries allow them to operate for longer without trailing industrial power cords. AI developers are adapting the innovations behind services like ChatGPT to help humanoids act more independently.

“You have all the breakthroughs needed to be able to execute on this problem, which is building robots that interact with the real world like humans do,” said Sankaet Pathak, founder of the San Francisco-based humanoid robots company Foundation.

The progress has triggered a frenzy of investment in humanoid robots and made them into a mascot for the idea that AI will soon reorder the world on the scale tech leaders have promised.