To The Moon

By Sean McLain | Photography and video by Kelsey McClellan for WSJ. Billions of dollars are flowing into humanoid robot startups, as investors bet that the industry will soon put humanlike machines in warehouses, factories and our living rooms.Many leaders of those companies would like to temper those expectations. For all the recent advances in the field, humanoid robots, they say, have been overhyped and face daunting technical challenges before they move from science experiments to a replacement for human workers.Agility currently has hundreds of its Digit robots working with customers, including Amazon.com and auto-parts company Schaeffler. They perform tasks including picking up items and moving them around a warehouse.Velagapudi is skeptical. Getting human-shaped robots into warehouses or industrial sites to move boxes is one thing, he said; building a robot butler is beyond the industry's current capabilities, with current robots too unreliable to perform complex tasks.But the g