September 10, 2026
We'll say it plainly: today's crop of robotics stories -- a cyborg cockroach rescue concept out of the University of Queensland, a frog-muscle-powered robotic manta ray from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a scalable robotic fish from New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, reported by New Atlas -- has nothing to do with bipedal, human-shaped machines. No torsos, no arms, no walking. This is squarely biomimicry and soft robotics research, aimed at locomotion in constrained or hazardous environments, not at the warehouse floor or the factory line. We're not going to pretend otherwise just to hit a humanoid news quota.
That said, these projects aren't irrelevant to anyone thinking about robotics investment -- they're just relevant on a longer horizon. The cyborg cockroach work is explicitly framed around disaster response: an insect that can navigate rubble a wheeled or legged robot can't, carrying sensors instead of a rescue team into a collapsed structure first. The frog-muscle manta ray and the NYU fish, called SCaFi, both chase the same holy grail -- getting a machine to move through a fluid environment as efficiently and quietly as the animal it's copying, and to do it at any scale researchers choose to build it. None of that is a product you can buy today. It's a pipeline of actuator and control ideas that, five or ten years out, could show up in soft grippers, search-and-rescue units, or underwater inspection robots that do jobs no rigid machine handles well now.
For a business audience, the more useful takeaway is the absence, not the presence. If you're evaluating humanoid robotics as a labor substitute -- for picking, sorting, last-mile delivery assistance, or repetitive manual tasks -- today's news gives you nothing new to act on. That's consistent with a pattern we keep flagging: humanoid platforms generate a lot of demo footage and funding headlines, but the underlying hardware research getting published right now is still solving basic problems like how to actuate a fin or steer an insect, not how to make a two-legged worker reliable at scale. If you're the kind of reader who tracks this space closely, that gap between hype and lab reality is worth remembering the next time a slick humanoid video crosses your feed.
Our honest opinion: businesses evaluating automation spend in 2025 and 2026 should treat humanoid robots as a five-plus-year bet, not a near-term line item, and put budget instead toward the software-side automation that's actually deployable today -- workflow automation, CRM, and internal tools that remove manual busywork without waiting on a breakthrough in soft actuators. If you're weighing where automation dollars go while the humanoid hardware story keeps its feet on the lab bench, tools like workflow automation or a no-code app builder deliver measurable efficiency now, without betting on when -- or whether -- a bipedal robot shows up on your floor. We've made this point before when the humanoid pipeline came up empty, and it holds again today: the strategy gap between robot demos and real deployment is still the story, as we noted in our look at the US robot strategy gap.
If you track this space, what would actually change your mind that humanoid robots are close to real deployment -- a specific task, a price point, or something else entirely?
Sources