Bipedal Humanoid

A bipedal humanoid is a human-shaped robot that walks around on two legs, just like a person. Any robot with arms, legs, and a head tends to get called a "humanoid," but only the ones that actually walk on two legs get the more specific label "bipedal."

Think of a baby learning to walk. To stand on two feet, you have to constantly calculate where your center of gravity is shifting and adjust your body so you don't fall over. Wheeled robots, by contrast, are like tricycles — they don't have to worry about falling, so they move around much more stably. But they get stuck the moment they hit stairs, thresholds, or uneven ground. Bipedal walking is hard and unstable, but it's an attempt to make robots fit into a world built for people — a world full of stairs and doors.

That's why robots from the same company can look completely different. A wheeled robot that rolls around stably and only uses its arms, and a robot that walks on two legs and sometimes falls over, are entirely separate models with different purposes and different levels of maturity.

The article introduces Galbot's ET1 as "Galbot's first bipedal humanoid." This phrasing matters because the company's commercial model, G1, is actually a wheeled robot with no legs. In other words, the tennis demo by ET1 wasn't showing off the performance of the stable, commercially sold product — it was the first public demo of a newly unveiled bipedal model, revealed just three days earlier. Seeing the word "humanoid" shouldn't lead you to assume every Galbot robot walks on two legs.