Part 2: LLM‑Powered Humanoid Robots - From Hype to Factory Floor

Industrial humanoids are finally moving off demo stages and into pilot work‑cells. The missing ingredient is a cognitive stack that can juggle perception, long‑horizon planning, and real‑time control on constrained compute. Here’s how 2025’s LLM tech lines up.

Factory Pain‑Point	2025 Technique	Proof‑of‑Concepts
Long multi‑step manipulation (pick → re‑grasp → insert)	Long‑context windows + MemGPT‑style memory keep >20 sub‑goals alive.	ELLMER executes 17‑step assembly tasks on a Fanuc CRX‑25iA.
Rapid skill authoring by line engineers	Retrieval‑Augmented Generation 2.0 mines a knowledge base of ROS2 recipes; Dynamic LoRA compiles chat instructions into runnable nodes in seconds.	Alchemist IDE beta (ABB Robotics).
Real‑time inference in a 200 Hz control loop	SSM backbones + INT4 + 2:4 sparsity run on a single Jetson Orin‑NX.	IBM Bamba‑Tiny‑6Bdemo on Unitree H1.
One robot, many skills (balance, stairs, peg‑in‑hole)	Mixture‑of‑Experts routes tokens to locomotion vs manipulation specialists.	NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1with 64 experts.
Bridging sim‑to‑real & safety sign‑off	World‑Model co‑training: planner proposes, simulator vetoes unsafe trajectories.	Boston Dynamics Atlas @ Hyundai production trials.
Sub‑ms collision/risk monitoring	In‑loop guardrails rewrite or halt unsafe torque commands.	Meta Llama Guard‑Motionresearch prototype.

Stack in one sentence: Lean SSM core → MoE skill heads → Memory paging → Guardrail filter, all embedded in ROS2.