Bipedal robots may look impressive doing tricks on YouTube, but the real value lies with their less flashy, highly functional industrial cousins. At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing this week, robots ran, boxed, played football and performed synchronised cheerleading routines. One even beat Usain Bolt's 100-metre record before smashing into a padded wall. Such feats helped Unitree Robotics pull off a heavily oversubscribed Shanghai Stock Exchange listing, briefly hitting a $51bn market value. In the US, Elon Musk has claimed Tesla's Optimus could generate up to $10tn in long-term sales.

But humanoid robots struggled with dexterous tasks like clearing tables or plugging in chargers. Some roboticists argue mimicking human form is inefficient, requiring up to 30 axes of motion when simpler designs use half that, making them costlier and clumsier. The vast majority of installed robots are functional, single-operation machines handling dull, dirty, delicate and dangerous work.

China dominates industrial robotics with roughly 2mn installed units, 4.5 times more than Japan, and accounts for about 54 per cent of new global installations. Like Japan and South Korea, China adopts robots to offset ageing workforces. The US still leads in robotic software, while the Trump administration restricts foreign imports, with the FCC blocking humanoid and quadruped robot imports on national security grounds.