Figure 03 shipped with 20 kg of payload — five kg less than the platform it succeeded. The launch materials never marked the change. Across six manufacturers over three years of press releases, spec sheets, and shipped-unit measurements, a pattern of quiet downgrades keeps showing up. This is what to look for when the reveal deck does not match the datasheet.
A Digit-class humanoid leases at $30/hour. The warehouse worker it would displace costs $22/hour fully loaded. The gap closes quickly once integration, downtime, training, charging infrastructure, and depreciation enter the spreadsheet. Three real-world TCO scenarios with numbers traceable to public sources.
Of 43 humanoid robots tracked at biorobot.ai, only 8 ship with both native ROS2 support and Isaac Sim USD assets. ROS2 and Isaac Sim are not competitors — one is a deployment runtime, the other a training pipeline. A per-robot coverage matrix and a four-bucket decision tree for picking the right platform in 2026.
The cheapest humanoid robot you can wire-transfer money for and receive in mid-2026 is the Unitree R1 at $4,900. Every robot below $20,000 shipping today comes from a Chinese manufacturer. Every robot advertised at $20,000 — Figure 03, 1X NEO, Tesla Optimus, Kepler K2 — has not yet begun customer deliveries. A tiered guide with TCO math.