Descriptions:
Filmed live at the Humanoid Summit in Tokyo, this Bloomberg Technology segment captures what speakers are calling a pivotal industry inflection: the shift from proof-of-concept demonstrations to scalable commercial deployment. The segment opens with key market data — Barclays estimates the current humanoid robot market at $2–3 billion, with forecasts reaching $40 billion by 2035 and potentially $5 trillion by 2050 when services and supply chains are included. Just 13,000 humanoids shipped in 2025 compared with over half a million traditional industrial robots installed in a single year, but projections suggest as many as 12 million humanoids could be deployed by 2035.
The centerpiece interview features Carolina, head of Google DeepMind’s Robot Mobility Division, discussing Gemini Robotics — DeepMind’s effort to bring Gemini’s multimodal reasoning into the physical world. She outlines the recently announced partnership with Boston Dynamics on the commercialized Atlas robot and explains why highly dexterous manipulation — folding origami, packing a lunchbox — remains the hard unsolved frontier. A second interview features a chief engineer from Honda’s Frontier Robotics division, tracing the company’s evolution from ASIMO-era locomotion research through its 2013 pivot toward high-level mobility and now toward multi-fingered avatar robots.
The segment also addresses the US–China competitive dynamic directly, with China currently leading in humanoid unit volume at lower price points than Western manufacturers, and covers the multi-layer safety frameworks Google DeepMind and Honda are developing for robots operating in human environments.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Technology · Published May 29, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
