China Built 77.9% of the World's Humanoid Robots in H1 as a $3,555 Home Unit Goes on Sale

China shipped more than 19,000 humanoid robots in the first half of 2026, 77.9% of the global total, according to IDC figures reported by TechNode on 29 September. Global shipments reached nearly 25,000 units, up 432.1% year over year. IDC also raised its forecast for 2030 to more than 750,000 units, TechNode said, citing IT Home.

Those are shipment numbers, not factory output. They say nothing about what the robots do once they arrive. The same week brought a rounder, messier picture: a $3,555 domestic robot taking orders, a force torque sensing vendor booked for a trade show talk, a survey of industrial buying, a benchmark paper arguing that robot AI is uneven task by task, and a mapping project on Iowa manure. Only some of it is about humanoids.

A $3,555 robot that tidies, not assembles

On 29 September, The Robot Report reported that Flourish, a startup straddling San Francisco and Paris, opened sales for Flourish One, a wheeled humanoid-style home robot priced at $3,555. The first batch is 50 units, hand-built by a small team, and the company says it hopes to ship before Christmas.

The specification is deliberately modest. Six wheels, two arms with a 1.5 kg payload each, 12 hours of arm operation on a charge, a small lidar near the floor and wrist-mounted cameras on two-fingered grippers. Flourish One is not waterproof, so no dishes and no dog washing. The Robot Report cites founder Antoine Marcel, who says the payload was chosen because most household tasks do not need more.

"The way I tidy my apartment is not the same as you do in your house. You're going to show it for 30 minutes how to water your plants," Marcel told The Robot Report. "We're going to fine-tune an AI model for that... now the robot is able to do that in your house."

The training method is the interesting part. Users hold a smartphone and move it as if doing the chore, and the robot mirrors the motion using the phone's inertial measurement units. Skill models are trained and run in the cloud, which keeps the bill of materials down. Marcel told The Robot Report that fitting an NVIDIA GPU inside the robot would immediately double the cost. Flourish was founded in January 2026.

The sensing layer sells picks and shovels

Force torque sensors give robots a sense of touch. The Robot Report reported on 29 September that ForceN founder and CEO Robert Brooks will give a talk titled "A Crash Course in Force & Torque Sensing for Humanoids" at RoboBusiness 2026, on 20 and 21 October in Santa Clara, California. His session is at 2:15 p.m. PT on the first day.

ForceN supplies force torque sensors for robotic wrists and other joints. It has supplied sensing systems to surgical, logistics and humanoid robots, according to the same report. The company grew out of Brooks's PhD work on sensing and actuation for surgical robots at the University of Toronto and SickKids Hospital.

The pitch is that humanoids moving into industrial roles need to handle heavy and delicate objects without crushing them. The same trade show is drawing Vishay Precision Group, which announced on 1 October that it will showcase custom sensing capabilities for humanoid robotics at RoboBusiness 2026, according to a company announcement.

Industrial demand is real, but humanoids are a sliver

Underneath the humanoid headlines sits a larger and slower industrial robotics market. The Robot Report's "State of Robots in Manufacturing," published 29 September, notes that industrial robot installations doubled in the decade ending in 2024, according to the International Federation of Robotics, with South Korea, Singapore, Germany and Japan leading on robot density per 10,000 workers.

The same piece cites the Association for Advancing Automation: robot order value rose 6.6% year over year in the first half of 2026, with growth in non-automotive sectors offsetting a slowdown among automotive OEMs. It also states plainly that interest in humanoids is high but they are just beginning commercial trials, while other form factors are already available.

That framing matches the shipment arithmetic. Nearly 25,000 humanoid units worldwide is small next to the installed base of factory robots, and China's 19,000-plus units in six months is a manufacturing statistic before it is a deployment one.

Benchmarks hide the jagged parts

A technical report published 29 September by researchers at fig.inc argues that headline benchmark scores hide how unevenly robot and agent models perform. The team evaluated seven models on 177 closed-loop web tasks in VisualWebArena and three models across four physical domains: VLABench, Assembly101, IndEgo and Bench2Drive.

Their central claim is that, for every pair of models tested, the weaker model solved at least one task the stronger one missed. They call this a jagged profile, and they report the same unevenness in physical domains, where models that beat Gemini 3.5-Flash on every domain average still did worse on some task categories.

The authors also note a limitation: every cell in their sweep is a single pass, read against a plus or minus three percentage point noise band derived from a repeated Opus 4.7 run with a 50-step budget. They released a dataset called RIDGE with item-level results and model traces. The work is a technical report from the company, not a peer-reviewed study, and the models named include Astra, Opus 5.5 and Gemini 3.5-Flash.

What the factory question actually needs

If humanoid robots are going to work in factories, the constraint may not be the robot count. The Robot Report's manufacturing survey lists the hard parts as identifying the right applications, integrating them and showing a return on investment. ForceN's session is about not breaking sensors while doing it.

There is also a data gap in how these systems get evaluated. The fig.inc authors argue that a benchmark mean drops the dispersion that matters for deployment decisions. They add that the task category matters about as much as the choice of model.

Meanwhile, in a different corner of the same week's output, Sentient Media published a map of 10,830 factory farms in Iowa on 28 September, estimating nearly 170 billion pounds of manure a year from 126.4 million animals, based on Iowa Department of Natural Resources data. That is what the word factory means in most of the food system, and it has nothing to do with humanoids.

For the robotics market, the useful split is between units shipped and units working. China dominates the first number. Nobody in this week's material claims to know the second.