Autonomy

Autonomy is the goal behind humanoid robotics: operating in unstructured, dynamic environments without step-by-step instruction. But it’s not a binary switch, it’s a layered stack of systems, from low-level motion control to high-level task planning and reasoning.

Today’s humanoids combine model-predictive control (for balance and locomotion), behavior trees (for structured actions), and increasingly, transformer-based planners that interpret open-ended commands.

The rise of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models marks a major shift — integrating visual input, language understanding, and motor output into a unified policy. Recent systems demonstrate long-horizon planning, manipulation, and recovery behavior in previously unseen spaces.Emerging architectures mix cloud-based reasoning with onboard control, enabling humanoids to respond quickly while drawing on massive world models.