The robot industry has a memory problem.
Every January, CES fills with machines “shipping this year.” Every quarter, humanoid startups post demo videos with dates attached. And then — nothing keeps score. The announcements pile up, the dates slide, the demos loop, and when a company re-announces the same robot four years later, the industry claps like it’s new. Ask a simple question — which robot companies actually deliver what they promise? — and there is nowhere on the internet to look it up.
As of today, there is. The Robot Database is live — and it keeps the two records nobody else keeps.
The Database: every machine, one table
Every robot we track — humanoids to vacuums to mowers to delivery bots — in one searchable, sortable table: maker, category, real price, honest availability status, and our independent score. No pay-for-placement, same as everything on WhichBot. It’s the master catalog of the robot age, and it updates continuously as machines launch, slip, and die.
The Delivery Scores: promises vs. reality, 0 to 100
This is the part we expect arguments about — good. Thirty-seven companies, each scored 0-100 on promises kept versus promises made, receipts-first from the public record.
The top of the board belongs to the unglamorous: Roborock at 95, Husqvarna at 94 — companies whose CES promise is on a shelf by spring, every year, like clockwork. Unitree earned its 92 the hard way: promised a $16,000 humanoid, priced it, shipped it.
The bottom of the board is where the famous names live. A trillion-dollar company’s home robot, five years after announcement, still not broadly buyable. A flagship ball-shaped companion announced at CES 2020, re-announced at CES 2024, still rolling toward a shelf date that keeps walking. A humanoid revealed on stage once and never heard from again. The scores say what the press releases won’t.
And one entry carries the Watch’s darkest lesson: a companion robot that shipped, sold to families — and then bricked when the company died. Delivery isn’t the only risk in this category. Now that’s on the record too.
Why this matters (and who it’s for)
If you’re buying, the Delivery Score tells you whether a preorder is a purchase or a donation. If you’re watching the industry — investing, reporting, building — the database is the structured record that didn’t exist: what was promised, when, at what price, and what actually happened. The historical layer compounds daily, and it can’t be recreated retroactively. That’s the whole point: someone has to keep the receipts. We volunteered.
The Brief: the record, weekly
Alongside the database launches The Physical AI Brief — a free weekly digest of what moved: launches, slips, price changes, funding, and score updates, written with the same no-hype rules as everything here. The signup lives at the top of the database page.
The robot era is arriving one kept-or-broken promise at a time. Now there’s a scoreboard. See where every machine stands: the Robot Database →