Humanoid Robot Deployment Tracker 2026: Every Verified Factory and Warehouse Deployment

Humanoid Robot Deployment Tracker 2026

Last updated: September 26, 2026, 15:00 UTC| Updated monthly (first business week) and within 72 hours of any Tier 1 operator disclosure | Maintained by: Axis Intelligence Research & Liam Michael, Robotics

Quick Answer: How Many Humanoid Robots Are Actually Deployed?

Eight distinct humanoid robot deployments are documented in primary sources as of September 26, 2026. Five of them — 62.5% by the Axis Deployment Verification Ratio™ — carry operator-side confirmation rather than vendor disclosure alone. The ratio rose from 57.1% in August, but not one vendor-only deployment gained operator confirmation in the interval: the entire move comes from adding a deployment that was already operator-confirmed.

Key Findings

According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Deployment Verification Ratio™ reads 62.5% as of September 26, 2026, up from a 57.1% baseline on August 9 — with zero tier promotions across the seven deployments tracked in both readings.

BMW Group disclosed on September 21, 2026 that its concluded Figure 02 pilot at Plant Spartanburg required two subsequent fixes: revised safety concepts with additional barriers and partitions, and improved 5G coverage in the hall. This is the first remediation detail any operator has published about a humanoid deployment.

BMW Group confirmed on September 21, 2026 that Plant Leipzig is running Europe’s first humanoid pilot with Hexagon Robotics’ AEON, a wheeled humanoid standing 1.65 m, weighing 60 kg, and moving at up to 2.5 m/s.

Tesla’s Form 8-K for Q2 2026 lists Optimus under Robotics at both California and Texas with the status “Construction,” and states that construction at Fremont began after the Model S and X lines were decommissioned, with production anticipated later in the year.

Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, 2026, stating that the robot is engineered to work in close proximity to people without the physical safety barriers required by traditional automation, with more than $300 million in multi-year customer orders as of May 2026 subject to contractual milestones.

What Is the Axis Deployment Verification Ratio™?

Every entry carries an evidence tier. The tier records who is making the claim, not how impressive it is.

Tier	Definition
T1	The operator publishes the deployment and operational data (hours, units, output, throughput).
T2	The operator publicly confirms the deployment; no operational data published.
T3	The vendor discloses the deployment, including in regulatory filings; the operator has not publicly confirmed it.
T4	Media reporting only; no company or filing source. T4 entries do not enter this tracker.

Formula (v1.0, unchanged): (distinct deployments at T1 or T2) ÷ (all distinct deployments) × 100.

Reading 2, September 26, 2026: 62.5% (5 of 8). Reading 1, August 9, 2026: 57.1% (4 of 7), retained unchanged — historical readings are never recomputed.

What moved, and what didn’t. One deployment entered the set: Mercedes-Benz / Apptronik Apollo, at T2. Nothing else changed tier. Schaeffler, Boston Dynamics and UBTech sat at T3 in August and sit at T3 today — seven weeks in which three operators running or receiving humanoid robots published nothing of their own. A ratio that climbs only because the denominator grew is not the industry becoming more transparent. It is the industry getting bigger at roughly its existing level of transparency.

Interpretive rule added this cycle (v1.1, pending Editorial Director sign-off). Where a named operator executive is quoted in a joint vendor announcement, that counts as operator confirmation (T2), even if the operator publishes nothing separately. This is what admits the Mercedes-Benz entry at T2 rather than T3, on the strength of a board-member quote. The formula itself is unversioned and unchanged; only the tier-assignment wording is affected, and Reading 2 is labelled accordingly in the CSV.

Verified Humanoid Robot Deployments (Reverse Chronological)

September 21, 2026 — BMW Group confirms the Leipzig pilot is running, and publishes what Spartanburg cost to fix

Two things in this article matter, and the second is the one nobody else has picked up.

First, the flag clears. BMW states that Plant Leipzig is running the first European pilot project involving a humanoid robot in its production network, with AEON initially supporting high-voltage battery assembly and component production, taking over where repetition, precision and ergonomics are critical. BMW publishes AEON’s physical envelope for the first time: 1.65 metres tall, 60 kilograms, moving through the hall at up to 2.5 metres per second, with a torso that accepts a range of grippers, hands or scanning devices without changing its core structure. BMW also says workstations will be adapted and employees themselves will help determine which tasks suit the robot — the schedule language from February (“pilot operations in the summer of this year”) survives verbatim into the September text, which is why the entry moves to operational on the newsroom article’s own framing rather than on a stated start date.

Second, the remediation. BMW writes that the Spartanburg pilot delivered insights including revised safety concepts with additional barriers and partitions, and improved 5G coverage in the hall. Read that against the industry’s central sales pitch. Humanoids are sold on the premise that they fit infrastructure built for people, so you do not have to rebuild the plant around the robot. BMW’s most successful humanoid deployment ended with BMW adding barriers and partitions and upgrading the wireless network. That is a facility modification and a network upgrade — the two costs the humanoid form factor is supposed to eliminate. It appears nowhere in a vendor deck, and it is the single most useful sentence published about humanoid deployment economics this year.

Evidence tier: T2 (Leipzig), T1 (the Spartanburg remediation detail attaches to the concluded pilot). Flag cleared: pending_primary on HRD-2026-003, open since the August baseline. Primary source: BMW Group.

September 15, 2026 — Agility Robotics unveils Digit 5

Agility announced Digit 5 as its first humanoid engineered for cooperatively safe work at scale, able to work close to people without the physical safety barriers required by traditional automation. The robot monitors for people using AI algorithms and multiple sensor technologies and responds by avoiding the person, stopping, or assuming a seated position, with visual and auditory cues conveying motion intent and an independent safety controller supervising the response when someone is detected within an unsafe distance. Peggy Johnson said Digit 5 was built to the requirements customers gave after three years of Digit 4 on their production floors. Agility restated more than $300 million in multi-year orders as of May 2026, subject to contractual milestones, and described RoboFab in Salem, Oregon as a 70,000-square-foot facility designed for up to 10,000 robots a year at full capacity.

Set this beside the BMW disclosure above and the sector’s real bottleneck comes into focus. The entire Digit 5 pitch is the removal of safety barriers; BMW’s post-pilot fix was to add them. Both statements are from primary sources, and they are pointed in opposite directions.

Evidence tier: T3 (vendor). Not a deployment — a product launch; excluded from the DVR denominator. Primary source: Agility Robotics.

July 22, 2026 — Tesla files its Q2 update: Optimus is a construction site, not a deployment [new this cycle]

Recorded as a documented non-deployment, because the absence is now sourced rather than assumed. Tesla’s Form 8-K exhibit states that construction at the Fremont Factory for Optimus began after the Model S and X lines were decommissioned, with anticipated production later this year. The installed-capacity table lists Robotics — Optimus at California and Texas with the status Construction, alongside products marked Production and Pilot Production. Tesla has never published an Optimus unit count in a production report.

This entry exists so that the most-cited number in humanoid robotics has a primary source proving it does not exist. Widely circulated cumulative Optimus totals trace to no Tesla document; Tesla’s own filing says construction.

Evidence tier: T3. Status: construction. Excluded from the DVR denominator — nothing is deployed. Primary source: SEC EDGAR, Tesla Form 8-K Ex. 99.1.

July 16, 2026 — Agility Robotics opens Fremont Physical AI facility, discloses Digit v5 order book

Agility announced a 60,000-square-foot software and capabilities hub in Fremont, California, and stated it had secured more than $300 million of multi-year orders for Digit v5, subject to contractual milestones, with a pipeline of over 30 customers. The SEC-filed detail matters more than the headline: that $300 million reflects orders as of May 2026 relating to 1,000 Digit v5 robots on a three-year RaaS contract, including warrants that vest proportionately as robots deploy.

Evidence tier: T3 (vendor). Not a deployment — order book and vendor infrastructure; excluded from the DVR denominator. Primary source: Agility Robotics.

June 25, 2026 — BMW Group deploys Figure 03 on logistics sequencing at Plant Spartanburg

BMW Group announced that Figure 03 would begin work at Plant Spartanburg on complex sequencing applications in logistics: the robot picks components from larger containers, sorts them into a sequencing trolley, and the trolley moves to a collection point where an automated tugger train or Smart Transport Robot carries the parts to the installation location for “just in sequence” delivery to assembly employees. BMW frames the use case as one that occurs frequently in automotive production logistics with potential for scalability.

BMW does not state a unit count, and did not add one in the September article. Three months on, the successor to the industry’s most-documented deployment still has less disclosure attached to it than its predecessor.

Evidence tier: T2. Status: operational. Primary source: BMW Group PressClub, T0458778EN.

June 24, 2026 — Agility Robotics files SPAC investor presentation with deployment metrics

The Churchill Capital Corp XI 8-K exhibit remains the most quantified vendor disclosure in the sector, and it is a regulated filing rather than a blog post. Agility reported 9 committed customer facility deployments and 65,000 hours of operation as of May 2026, listing Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Amazon and Mercado Libre as customers of Digit v4. The deployment slide breaks that into 8 deployments plus 3 booked, with the GXO tote workflow at 98% accuracy and more than 100,000 totes moved, and the Mercado Libre workflow at 98% accuracy and roughly 25,000 totes. Agility also states that Digit v4 carries up to 35 lbs, that its current bill of materials is approximately $125,000, and that RoboFab is designed for 10,000 units of annual capacity.

One entry inside that filing is a genuine site-level deployment record: Digit v4 at Schaeffler’s plant in Cheraw, South Carolina, placing 25-pound baskets of bearing components from a stamp press into an industrial washing machine. Schaeffler has still published no account of its own — unchanged since August.

Evidence tier: T3 (vendor, regulated filing). Primary source: SEC EDGAR, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.2.

February 27, 2026 — BMW Group publishes results of the concluded Figure 02 pilot at Spartanburg

The only Tier 1 entry in this tracker. BMW Group reported that within ten months the Figure 02 robot supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles, working ten-hour shifts Monday to Friday, handling the removal and positioning of sheet metal parts for welding; in total it moved more than 90,000 components and covered approximately 1.2 million steps in around 1,250 operating hours. BMW added that the transition from laboratory to production environment was faster than expected, and that integration ran through standardised interfaces into its Smart Robotics ecosystem. The September 2026 newsroom article restates every one of these figures unchanged and adds the remediation detail recorded above.

Read the arithmetic before quoting the headline. 1,250 operating hours across ten-hour weekday shifts is roughly 125 shifts — about six months of weekdays inside a ten-month window. The robot was not on the line every day. And BMW’s own releases describe “the robot Figure 02,” singular, where much of the coverage says two robots and eleven months. Where the operator and the vendor’s ecosystem disagree on duration and count, this tracker records the operator: ten months, singular, 1,250 hours.

Evidence tier: T1. Status: concluded. Primary sources: BMW Group PressClub, T0455864EN and BMW Group newsroom, September 21, 2026.

January 5, 2026 — Boston Dynamics unveils production Atlas; all 2026 output committed

Boston Dynamics announced at CES that it would begin production of the new electric Atlas at its Boston headquarters immediately, that all 2026 Atlas deployments were already fully committed with fleets shipping to Hyundai’s Robotics Metaplant Application Center and Google DeepMind, and that additional customers would follow in early 2027. The production robot has 56 degrees of freedom, a reach of 2.3 m, lifts up to 50 kg, operates from -20°C to 40°C, swaps its own batteries autonomously, and connects to MES and WMS systems through Boston Dynamics’ Orbit software. Hyundai Mobis will supply the actuators, and Boston Dynamics referenced Hyundai’s $26 billion US investment including a robotics factory capable of 30,000 robots per year.

No unit count for the 2026 run has been published, and none has appeared in the seven weeks since the August baseline. Widely circulated figures of 25,000 or 30,000 Atlas units describe Hyundai’s stated plans and capacity, not machines on a floor. Boston Dynamics’ own language is that Hyundai is “preparing to deploy” tens of thousands. Show me the shipped units and the tier moves.

Evidence tier: T3. Status: announced. Verification flag: pending_primary on the 2026 unit count, re-checked September 26, still open. Primary source: Boston Dynamics.

November 17, 2025 — UBTech begins mass delivery of Walker S2 [older data]

UBTech announced mass production and delivery of a first batch of several hundred Walker S2 industrial humanoids, moving toward a target of 500 units delivered within the year, with cumulative Walker-series orders since early 2025 exceeding 800 million yuan, and a capacity plan of 5,000 units annually by 2026 scaling to 10,000 by 2027. UBTech named BYD, Dongfeng Liuzhou Motor, Geely Auto, FAW-Volkswagen Qingdao, Audi FAW, BAIC New Energy, Foxconn and SF Express among its partners, and disclosed a 159 million yuan Walker S2 contract for a data collection centre in Zigong.

[older data] — still the most recent UBTech release traced to a primary corporate source. Note what the number is: an order book in yuan, not robots working shifts. None of the named operators has published its own deployment account.

Evidence tier: T3. Primary source: UBTech Robotics via PR Newswire.

June 27, 2024 — GXO and Agility sign the first commercial humanoid RaaS agreement [older data]

GXO Logistics and Agility Robotics announced a multi-year agreement to deploy Digit in GXO’s logistics operations following a 2023 proof-of-concept, described as both the industry’s first formal commercial deployment of humanoid robots and the first Robots-as-a-Service deployment, with GXO’s Chief Automation Officer Adrian Stoch quoted on moving from pilot to a live warehouse environment.

Retained as the origin entry of the commercial era, and because it is the one deployment where the operator put its own name on the record before the robot had a track record.

Evidence tier: T2. Primary source: Agility Robotics / GXO.

March 15, 2024 — Mercedes-Benz and Apptronik pilot Apollo in manufacturing [older data] [new this cycle]

Admitted this cycle after a backlog review. Apptronik announced a commercial agreement under which Mercedes-Benz would pilot Apollo in its manufacturing facilities, exploring use cases in logistics — bringing parts to the production line as assembly kits while simultaneously inspecting components, and delivering totes of kitted parts later in the process. Apollo is described as roughly human-sized, 5 feet 8 inches and 160 pounds, able to lift 55 pounds, with a force-control architecture intended to keep it safe around people. Jörg Burzer, Member of the Board of Management of Mercedes-Benz Group AG for Production, Quality and Supply Chain Management, is quoted describing the programme as exploring the potential of robotics to fill labour gaps in low-skill, repetitive and physically demanding work.

That board-member quote is why this sits at T2 rather than T3, under the interpretive rule added this cycle. It is also the only thing keeping it there: in two and a half years, Mercedes-Benz has published no deployment account of its own, no site, no unit count, no operating hours. [older data] — no more recent operator-side primary source traced.

Evidence tier: T2. Status: pilot. Primary source: Apptronik.

How We Curate This List

What counts as a deployment. A humanoid robot — bipedal or wheeled, with a human-scale upper body and two arms — performing or scheduled to perform work in a commercial operator’s facility under a commercial arrangement (purchase, RaaS, or a named pilot inside a production or logistics environment). Research fleets at an AI lab count only where the receiving organisation is named and the platform is the commercial product.

What does not count. Demonstrations, trade-show appearances, marathons, sports stunts, and factory-floor videos with no operator statement. Internal use by the robot’s own manufacturer, unless a third-party operator is named. Capacity announcements, order books, and letters of intent — recorded as context inside an entry, never as deployed units. Any claim traceable only to media coverage: no primary source, no row.

Source hierarchy. Operator press release or filing ▸ vendor SEC/HKEX/regulatory filing ▸ vendor press release ▸ nothing. Trade press is used to locate primary documents and never to supply a figure.

When sources conflict, the operator wins. The Figure 02 duration (ten months, per BMW; eleven months, per the vendor’s quote reproduced across the trade press) is recorded as BMW states it, with the discrepancy noted in the entry.

Unit counts. Recorded only where the source states them. not_disclosed is a value we publish, not a gap we fill.

Documented non-deployments. Where a widely cited deployment claim is contradicted by the company’s own filing, the contradiction is recorded as an entry with a primary source and excluded from the DVR denominator. Tesla Optimus is the first.

Correction and review triggers. A new Tier 1 operator disclosure, a change of evidence tier on any existing entry, a regulatory filing containing deployment metrics, or a deployment ending.

Editorial Exclusions (and Why)

Aggregated “installed base” figures. Claims that Chinese manufacturers account for 80%+ of global humanoid installations, and various five-figure fleet totals, remain excluded pending a methodology we can inspect. The IFR World Robotics series does not yet break out humanoids as a separate installation category.

Analyst adoption forecasts. Projections of new units entering service in 2026 are forecasts, not deployments, and do not enter a tracker of what has happened.

Robot.com R-noid, Fourier GR-1/GR-2, XPeng IRON, Unitree H1 Pro, Jabil / Apollo, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Amazon, Mercado Libre. Still in the review queue. Each is named in a vendor source but lacks either a named site or an operator-side statement that would let it stand as its own entry rather than a line inside Agility’s filing. Toyota and Mercado Libre are the closest to admission.

Tesla Optimus is no longer an exclusion. It is now an entry — as a documented non-deployment, sourced to Tesla’s own 8-K.

Methodology

Every row in the CSV carries source_org, source_document, source_url, retrieved_date and is_primary. All nineteen data rows are is_primary = yes; the two axis_calculated = yes rows are the DVR readings, each with its formula in method_note.

The denominator is reproducible: filter counts_in_dvr = yes, deduplicate on deployment_key, and divide T1+T2 by the total. Aggregate vendor metrics (65,000 hours, nine facilities, order books) are deliberately excluded because counting them would let a single vendor’s disclosure inflate a ratio designed to measure independence from vendor disclosure. Product launches (Digit 5) and non-deployments (Optimus) are excluded on the same principle.

Limitations. Two readings are not a trend, and this page will not describe one until there are four. The tracker is English-language-weighted; Chinese operator disclosures in Mandarin-only channels remain under-represented and are the largest known gap. The DVR measures who confirms, not how well the robot works — a T3 deployment is not necessarily a worse deployment, only a less independently evidenced one. The v1.1 interpretive rule on operator-executive quotes is pending Editorial Director sign-off and is disclosed in the Reading 2 method_note.

Dataset: humanoid-robot-deployment-tracker.csv · CC BY 4.0 · Cite as: Axis Intelligence Research, Humanoid Robot Deployment Tracker, 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many humanoid robots are deployed in factories in 2026?

No credible total exists, and anyone publishing one is estimating. Eight distinct deployments are documented in primary sources as of September 26, 2026, and most of their unit counts are undisclosed. The largest quantified fleet commitment in a regulatory filing is Agility’s $300 million order book covering 1,000 Digit v5 robots on three-year RaaS contracts, subject to milestones.

Has Tesla started producing Optimus?

Not according to Tesla. Its Q2 2026 Form 8-K lists Optimus under Robotics at California and Texas with the status “Construction” and says production is anticipated later in the year. Tesla has never disclosed an Optimus unit count in a production report.

Which humanoid robot deployment has the most published operational data?

BMW’s concluded Figure 02 pilot at Plant Spartanburg. BMW published vehicles supported (30,000+), components moved (90,000+), operating hours (approximately 1,250) and steps taken (approximately 1.2 million) — and, in September 2026, the remediations the pilot required. No other deployment in this tracker has an operator-published hours figure.

Do humanoid robots really work without changing the factory?

BMW’s own answer is the most specific on record, and it is qualified. After the Spartanburg pilot, BMW cites revised safety concepts with additional barriers and partitions, plus improved 5G coverage in the hall. Agility, meanwhile, says Digit 5 is designed to work close to people without physical safety barriers. Budget for facility changes until an operator publishes a deployment that needed none.

What does the Deployment Verification Ratio™ tell an operations team?

That 37.5% of what you have read about humanoid deployments comes only from the company selling the robot. Before you cite a deployment in a business case, check which side of that line it sits on — the tier is in the CSV, per entry.

How often is this tracker updated?

Monthly, in the first business week, plus within 72 hours of any Tier 1 operator disclosure. The URL never changes and dateModified is bumped on every substantive revision.

Changelog

September 26, 2026 — Update 1. Two entries added (Mercedes-Benz / Apptronik Apollo, T2; Tesla Optimus as a documented non-deployment, excluded from the denominator). One pending_primary flag cleared (BMW Leipzig AEON, now operational on BMW’s September 21 disclosure). One pending_primary flag re-checked and retained (Boston Dynamics Atlas 2026 unit count). Four data rows added from BMW’s September 21 article and Agility’s September 15 launch. DVR Reading 2 published at 62.5%; Reading 1 retained unchanged at 57.1%. Interpretive rule v1.1 on operator-executive quotes introduced, pending Editorial Director sign-off.

No corrections to publish this cycle. No figure carried in the August baseline was found to be wrong; every prior figure re-verified against its source. Archive — entries older than 12 months

Archive holds entries retired from the main chronology as they pass twelve months. The two oldest live entries (Apptronik / Mercedes-Benz, March 2024; GXO / Agility, June 2024) remain in the main chronology because both are still the current state of their deployment. No entries retired as of September 2026.

Others Pages

• Figure AI Statistics
• Humanoid Robot Statistics