Purpose-Built Arms Beat Humanoids in Sorting, But Generality Wins Long-Term
xmercury_one · x · 2026-08-13
A recent livestream test showed that X Square's purpose-built 6-axis WALL-B robotic arms sorted parcels at 1.98 seconds/item, outperforming Figure's humanoid robot (2.88 seconds/item) by nearly 45%. Despite the clear advantage of specialized hardware in single tasks, the author remains highly bullish on humanoids. Comparing the dynamic to cameras vs. smartphones, the argument is that while specialized devices excel at one thing, humanoids will ultimately succeed because they can perform many vastly different tasks.
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