Robotics deployment in the real world follows a clear progression from fully structured environments like factories, to semi-structured environments like warehouses, to unstructured environments like homes — and the most pragmatic approach is to focus on semi-structured environments first.
Yinuo describes the natural deployment trajectory of robotics — structured to semi-structured to unstructured — arguing the pragmatic path is to solve semi-structured settings like warehouses before tackling homes. ✦ AI generated
Yinuo · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-28 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 29:31
“you have told me that you think a lot of the predictions around humanoids were a little bit aggressive and we're likely to see more constrained rollouts like warehouses or whatever. Can you talk a little bit about that and like how that impacts what you're going to be tackling here at the like world labs?”
So that's a very good question. So if you look at for example all the uh progressions of robotic applications in the real environments it has always followed the trend from going from fully structured environments into semiructured environments and then into unstructured environments. For fully structured environments what do we mean that you have knowledge and control over all the configurations within the environments like factories like factories or for car manufacturing mice those has been automated for decades. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you have for example semiructured environments which you have certain controls over the environments for example like the Amazon warehouses or for example like restaurants hotels where you have certain control over the environment to just make the task easier for your robots but there are obviously many other like objects or for example clothes those are the object you don't have control and then for the unstructured environments it's like your home and my host those is I would say the grand challenge. If you're thinking about where does the robustness coming from, robustness coming from a sufficient coverage of the scenarios that robots might encounter. So, it's so much easier and more approachable at least like right now to focus more on the semiructured environments before we move on to fully unstructured environments. So, we will move into that direction. It's just we want to uh take a more sustainable and more realistic approach towards it.
verbatim transcript · starts at 29:31
29:11making sure we have the infrastructure we have all the words such as the robot can work reliably in the real environment. you know, you you you have uh told me um that you think uh a lot of the predictions around humanoids were a little bit aggressive and we're likely to see more constrained rollouts like warehouses or whatever. Can you talk a little bit about that and like how that
29:31impacts what you're going to be tackling here at uh the like world labs? >> So that's a very good question. So if you look at for example all the uh progressions of robotic applications in the real environments it has always followed the trend from going from fully structured environments into semiructured environments and then into unstructured environments. >> For fully structured environments what do we mean that you have knowledge and
29:57control over all the configurations within the environments >> like factories >> like factories or for car manufacturing mice those has been automated for decades. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you have for example semiructured environments which you have certain controls over the environments for example like the Amazon warehouses or for example like restaurants hotels where you have certain control over the environment to just make the task easier for your
30:21robots but there are obviously many other like objects or for example clothes those are the object you don't have control and then for the unstructured environments it's like your home and my host >> those is I would say the the grand challenge Especially Especially my house, trust me. Three dogs, [laughter] >> five-year-old. >> Yes, dogs. >> Exactly. >> If you're thinking about where does the robustness coming from, robustness
30:45coming from a sufficient coverage of the scenarios that robots might encounter. So, it's so much easier and more approachable at least like right now to focus more on the semiructured environments before we move on to fully unstructured environments. So, we will move into that direction. It's just we want to uh take a more sustainable and more realistic approach towards it. >> I think your point here is that
31:08humanoids mimics human body and evolution has optimized human body for unstructured environment. And so our fingers, our legs are not the best apparatus to do one thing. For example, if if if our only goal as a species is to climb trees, we will not have this body necessarily, right? So, we'll have different kind of fingers. But what humans end up having are involve evolved into is this this body