The roboticist who co-founded iRobot just delivered a brutal reality check to the humanoid robot industry. Rodney Brooks, who spent decades at MIT developing the technology that powers today's autonomous vacuums, says investors pouring billions into companies like Tesla and Figure are funding "pure fantasy thinking" that will never scale to mass production.
The man who helped create the Roomba just torched the entire humanoid robotics industry. Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and former MIT AI lab director, published a scathing takedown of the billions flowing into companies trying to build human-like robots.
Brooks specifically targets Tesla's Optimus program and Figure, which just raised funding at a staggering $39 billion valuation. Both companies are betting they can teach robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans performing tasks. Brooks calls this approach "pure fantasy thinking" in his latest essay.
The fundamental problem? Human hands pack about 17,000 specialized touch receptors into a space smaller than a smartphone. No current robot comes remotely close to matching this tactile sophistication. "While machine learning revolutionized speech recognition and image processing, those breakthroughs built on decades of existing technology for capturing the right data," Brooks explains. "We don't have such a tradition for touch data."
This isn't just an academic critique from the sidelines. Brooks has been building robots since the 1980s, when he pioneered behavior-based robotics at MIT. His work led directly to the algorithms that power modern autonomous systems, from Mars rovers to the millions of Roombas navigating living rooms worldwide. When he calls something impossible, investors should listen.
The safety mathematics are equally damning. Full-sized walking humanoid robots require massive energy to stay upright - energy that becomes destructive when they inevitably fall. Brooks points out that basic physics means a robot twice the size of today's prototypes would pack eight times the harmful energy upon impact. That's not a software problem you can patch.
Meanwhile, the funding frenzy continues. Figure announced its latest round just weeks ago, with backers including Microsoft and Nvidia betting on humanoids for warehouse and manufacturing work. Tesla keeps promising Optimus will revolutionize labor, with Elon Musk claiming the robots could eventually be worth more than the car business.
