Humanoid Robots and Humanoid AI: Review, Perspectives and Directions
Longbing Cao
TL;DR
The paper surveys humanoid AI from human-looking to humane and human-level systems, arguing that current humanoids fall short of true human intelligence and humanity. It outlines six-stage evolution, three humanization paradigms, and a holistic ecosystem and taxonomy that embed AI humanoids within human science, intelligent science, and social contexts. A central contribution is a comprehensive framework of functional and nonfunctional specifications, detailing 11 functional domains and four nonfunctional dimensions, alongside perspectives on mind-to-action, omnimodal modeling, and virtual-real metaverse symbiosis. The work highlights opportunities and challenges in advancing humane humanoids, emphasizes ethical, legal, and societal considerations, and points to future research directions such as on-humanoid GenAI, digital twins, and scalable human-centric governance to enable practical, responsible deployment.
Abstract
In the approximately century-long journey of robotics, humanoid robots made their debut around six decades ago. While current humanoids bear human-like appearances, none have embodied true humaneness, remaining distant from achieving human-like to human-level intelligence. The rapid recent advancements in generative AI and (multimodal) large language models have further reignited and escalated interest in humanoids towards real-time, interactive, and multimodal designs and applications, such as fostering humanoid workers, advisers, educators, medical professionals, caregivers, and receptionists. These unveil boundless opportunities of transforming 1) AI robotics into a research era of humanoid AI, and 2) AI robots into new-generation humanoid AI robots (AI humanoids). Our unique and comprehensive review of about 30 reported humanoids discloses a systematic terminology and a paradigmatic landscape of human-looking to human-like and human-level humanoids. It inspires comprehensive new perspectives and directions of humanoid AI as an area: transitioning from human-looking to humane humanoids, humanizing humanoids with functional and nonfunctional specifications, and cultivating technical and actionable advances of AI humanoids. Humanoid AI and AI humanoids nurture symbiotic advancements and future opportunities of synthesizing and transforming humanity modeling and conventional, generative to human-level AI into humanoid robotics.