After more than two decades covering robotics, I can say with near-total confidence that there is absolutely no practical reason for a home humanoid robot to have breasts — let alone strut across a stage like it’s auditioning for a fashion show.
And yet, that’s exactly where parts of the humanoid robot industry seem to be heading. The space was already strange, but it’s recently taken a turn toward the downright bizarre.
It started with Chinese EV maker XPeng unveiling IRON, a humanoid robot so convincingly human — and so conspicuously feminized — that the company felt compelled to publicly strip parts of it away. Foam-like “skin” was peeled back to expose metal frames, motors, and wiring, apparently to reassure skeptics that this was, in fact, a machine and not a person in disguise.
Just days later, Russia made its long-awaited entrance into the humanoid race with a robot called “Idol,” a name that now feels unintentionally ironic. The robot emerged from behind a curtain to the blaring soundtrack of Rocky, shuffled forward looking hunched and disoriented, and then promptly collapsed. The moment devolved into chaos as handlers dragged the lifeless machine offstage while crew members desperately tried to hide the spectacle behind a tangled curtain.
Both moments served as reminders of just how risky — and unforgiving — the humanoid robot race has become. Companies are now competing against a crowded field that includes Tesla’s latest version of Optimus (recently spotted dancing alongside Elon Musk), the 1X Neo Beta advertised across New York City subway stations, Unitree’s G1, and Figure AI’s Figure 03.
None of these robots are anywhere near ready for domestic use, but most of them at least avoid the stranger missteps seen with IRON and Idol.
The Neo Beta, for example, now sports a soft outer shell, but it’s clearly designed as an asexual machine. It doesn’t sway its hips or try to emulate human allure; it simply trudges along, attempting to assist with household chores — though it’s still unclear how much it can do without a human operator controlling it remotely.
Meanwhile, robots like Optimus and Figure 03 are only just beginning to approach the mobility milestones achieved years ago by Boston Dynamics’ Atlas. They can walk across a room and wave — a meaningful step forward, but hardly revolutionary. Against that backdrop, Russia’s Idol feels like a relic from another era. I haven’t seen a robot fail so publicly and spectacularly since Honda’s ASIMO famously tumbled down a short staircase back in 2007.
Humanoid robotics as a whole remains brutally difficult. What we’re seeing from China and Russia, however, are two very different but equally problematic trends: overpromising and underdelivering.
IRON is, on a technical level, an impressive machine. It reportedly features a humanoid spine, flexible artificial skin, and domestically developed AI. What remains completely unexplained is why it needed to look and move like a 1980s supermodel. The result is a robot that leans hard into the uncanny, amplifying discomfort through its overly human appearance — and, frankly, its unsettling texture.
Watching executives slice away that strange foam “flesh” triggered flashbacks to low-budget sci-fi films from the 1970s, and not in a good way. None of it felt necessary for a robot that, realistically, will almost certainly look nothing like this if it ever reaches a commercial product stage years down the line.
As for Idol, it’s hard to know what lesson to take from that debut. Russia may now be so isolated from the global tech conversation that it has lost track of the current state of humanoid robotics altogether. The robot itself looked confused — as if it were questioning its own existence and wondering why it had been dragged onto that stage in the first place.
