concept also: humanoids, humanoid robots
Humanoid robot
A general-purpose robot with a roughly human form, on the bet that a world already built for human bodies is best navigated by one.
The recent shift is from hand-coded control to learned policies — one model trained from demonstration and simulation, handling many tasks. The bottleneck moved from hardware to data.
The unglamorous prerequisite is robust locomotion: staying balanced and recovering from being knocked off course. Without it, none of the flashier manipulation work leaves the lab.