Humanoid futures without lock-in: a design-driven framework for morphology, infrastructure, and policy

Abstract

While humanoid robots are increasingly framed as the “natural” solution for human-scale environments (from factories to public spaces) this immediate “fit” carries the risk of a long-term “morphological lock-in.” This article argues that prioritizing human resemblance in robotics is not merely a technical choice but a socio-technical commitment that may prematurely foreclose alternative, and potentially more efficient, robotic forms. By synthesizing scholarship on path dependence with recent signals from the 2024–2025 industrial deployment wave, we identify three stabilizing mechanisms such as infrastructural compatibility, social familiarity, and narrowing engineering horizons. To counteract this tendency, we propose a three-level transition framework: (1) Design Research that decouples “fitness for task” from “human likeness” to generate morphological diversity(2) Experimental Infrastructures that serve as incubation environments for non-humanoid formsand (3) Anticipatory Governance that shifts standards from prescribing form to evaluating performance outcomes. This study contributes a design-driven roadmap to ensure that the future of robotics is not limited to a single archetype but remains open to a pluralism of bodies optimized for diverse functions. Copyright © 2026. Published by Elsevier Ltd.