Methodology
How the Humanoid Ledger is built, what each number measures, and what it cannot tell you. Last updated 2026-11-08.
1. 本站係咩
一本人形機械人嘅公開數據賬簿:核實過嘅規格、一條發布年表、官方影片,再加全網已分析嘅報道——以及由呢啲報道建起嘅三本賬(宣稱 vs 實測、評分、問題)。賬簿獨立,同所列任何廠商都冇隸屬關係。記賬嘅規矩好簡單:有出處先記,冇核實嘅寧願寫「未公布」,都唔估一個數字上去。
2. Seed data — verified before entry
The 12 models, 31 release events and 8 official videos were each checked against a vendor page or a trade-press report before entry (seeded 2026-11-06). Every row carries its source link. Prices are vendor-published only: target prices, estimates and unconfirmed reports live in the notes field, never in the price column. Where a figure is unpublished or unverified, the cell says Not stated rather than a guess.
3. Live coverage — sources and the relevance gate
Hacker News (Algolia API), Google News RSS (with Bing News RSS as fallback when Google rate-limits the Worker egress), tech-blog RSS (The Verge, Engadget, Wired, TechCrunch, IEEE Spectrum, The Robot Report, PCMag, Tom’s Guide, 9to5Google, Road to VR, UploadVR), YouTube search pages, and Reddit via Google News. Ingest runs hourly. An item counts for a model only when its headline names the product — vendor + model where the name alone is ambiguous (e.g. “Apollo” only counts with “Apptronik”, “Digit” only with “Agility”, “Atlas” only with “Boston Dynamics”). Items that fail the gate are counted as skipped, not silently dropped.
4. Per-article analysis
Each article is analyzed once by Workers AI (Llama 3.1 8B, max 2048 tokens, JSON only): a 1–3 paragraph summary plus structured extraction — sentiment index, comparison, usage time, recommendation index, per-aspect scores, verifiable claims, issues, and the author’s verdict. The model is instructed never to invent numbers, quotes, durations or facts not present in the evidence; undeterminable fields are null, never invented.
5. Evidence checking (what survives, what is dropped)
Two hard guards run on every analysis before it is stored. First, a compared product is kept only if its name appears in the evidence text (title + snippet + body excerpt); anything else is dropped as model invention, and the compares-with flag is recomputed from the surviving list. Second, a verdict quote is kept only if the exact quote appears in the evidence text; otherwise it is stored as null. Aspect scores are restricted to eight aspects — locomotion, dexterity, battery, payload, autonomy, safety, software, price — each scored −100 to +100 only when the article actually discusses that aspect.
6. The scoring decision — what the three retained fields are, and are not
Decision (2026-11-07): the sentiment index (0–100), the recommendation index (0–100) and the author verdict (buy / wait / skip / mixed, with the author’s own words) are retained in full, in the article cards, in the metrics pages and in the three ledgers. They are kept because they measure the source content and its author — the stance of an article, and the conclusion its author reached — not this site’s judgement of any product. This site issues no rating, no ranking, no recommendation and no prediction of its own: there is no site score anywhere on the ledger, no “best model” list, and no verdict written by us. That is the whole of the exception, and it is the only exception: the general rule for this ledger is the same as the no-scores rule — record what happened, cite the source, add no judgement of our own. The three retained fields are presented with their provenance (which article, analyzed from snippet or full text, with what confidence), with nulls counted and never filled in, so a reader can always see how thin the underlying signal is — for example, the recommendation index is not determined in 308 of 329 analyzed articles, because most coverage is news, not a buying recommendation.
7. 三本賬
宣稱 vs 實測攞每篇分析入面嘅 key_claims;只有模型確實講咗實測值,宣稱先會帶實測值列出(截至 2026-11-08,289 條宣稱入面有 55 條)。其餘係廠商或者來源嘅宣稱,按原樣記錄——淨係列出,唔作驗證。評分彙總 sentiment_index 同 recommendation_index(分布、計數、淨係對非空值取均值)以及作者結論計數。問題按 issues[] 嘅逐字相同聚類,再按型號分組。某型號喺賬入面冇行,就寫「無記錄」,絕對唔寫成 0。即時端點:/api/ledger/claims-vs-measured、/api/ledger/scores、/api/ledger/issues(全部接受 ?model=<key>)。
8. Limitations — read before quoting a number
- Most analysis is snippet-based. As of 2026-11-08, 307 of 329 analyzed articles were analyzed from the title + snippet only (22 from full text). A snippet-based analysis can miss context the full article contains; analyzed_from is shown on every card.
- Hacker News is one narrow audience. HN mentions represent the English-speaking technical community only; they are not a proxy for the public, for buyers, or for non-English discussion.
- Coverage is a starting set, not the universe. The ledger tracks 12 models; our November 2026 audit identified roughly 135–145 distinct current humanoid models across trackers. Models outside the 12 are absent, not rated zero.
- News sources are rate-limited. Google News repeatedly rate-limits the Worker egress; the ingest falls back to Bing News RSS. Gaps in a day’s intake usually mean a source failed, not that nothing happened.
- Document archiving. Added 7 Nov 2026 — see §11. Vendor pages are now archived with SHA-256 dual fingerprints, a seal and a SimHash; changes are recorded from the baseline. One gap remains: the Tesla Optimus official page returns 403 to this fetcher, so it has no baseline yet.
- Price history, deployment data, safety/failure registry. Price history was added 7 Nov 2026 — see /history/ and §13 (8 dated, sourced price points; the G1 is the only model with a documented price change). Deployment counts and operating hours still appear only as notes; there is no structured recall or accident table.
- AI extraction is fallible. Claims, issues and aspect scores are model extractions from the evidence, guarded as described in §5 — but a guard can only check what is in the evidence text. Treat every extracted row as a pointer back to its source article, not as a verified fact.
9. Corrections
Errors are corrected in the open and logged here, not silently fixed.
- 2026-11-07 — Sanctuary AI Phoenix: status corrected from “research/pilot” to “legacy — pivoted to software-only (June 2026)”. The company stopped positioning the whole humanoid as its product in June 2026; the model page now says so and the June 2026 pivot is in the release timeline.
10. 歸檔——2026 年 11 月 7 號新增
Five vendor documents are archived as a baseline (Figure 03 announcement, Unitree G1 product page, Boston Dynamics Atlas product page, Agility Digit solutions page, 1X NEO order page), each with a SHA-256 fingerprint of the raw fetch and of the cleaned text, a 6-character seal and a 64-bit SimHash. The baseline is the first archived version; every later check compares the live document against it and records any change in doc_changes (currently 0 rows — 0 changes means nothing has changed since the baseline, not that nothing is watched). Live endpoint: /api/archive; page: /archive/. The Tesla Optimus official page could not be baselined: tesla.com returns 403 to this fetcher. It will be retried with a rendered fetch; until then it is listed on /archive/ as not baselined, not silently omitted.
11. 開放數據——2026 年 11 月 7 號新增
Every dataset behind this site is open JSON with no key. /data/ lists the catalogue with denominators and coverage; /api/open-data returns the same catalogue live, including a row count for every D1 table. Live endpoint: /api/open-data.
12. 二期表——持久表,2026 年 11 月 7 號回填
Four persistent tables were backfilled from the 330 analyzed articles (snapshot 7 Nov 2026, 20:10 EST) and are served live with a ?model= filter. experience_records (55 rows): every key_claim that carries a measured value, classified by metric (locomotion, dexterity, battery, payload, autonomy, safety, software, price, other) — the value is the number as stated in the article, not an independent lab measurement. review_scores (224 rows): one row per analyzed article that carries a sentiment index, a recommendation index or a verdict — metadata only (reviewer = article source, score / 100, date, URL, aspects tested), no quoted opinion text. failure_modes (93 rows): issues clustered per model by identical wording, with mention counts, first/last seen dates and up to 3 source URLs. resale_snapshots (1 row): the G1, with used_price_median NULL — no used-sold market exists for humanoid robots in any reachable public source (see §13). Live endpoints: /api/experience, /api/review-scores, /api/failure-modes, /api/resale.
13. 歷史——過去、而家同未來三段完整,仍然係 0 嘅項同原因
賬簿按歷史、而家、未來三段完整記錄,絕對唔會以而家嘅 0 做起點、淨係等未來變化先記錄。歷史係基線,冇基線,未來變化就冇意義,所以每個維度都要按公開來源同已採文章所及嘅範圍回填。2026 年 11 月 7 號回填結果(330 篇已分析文章,2026-11-07 20:10 EST 快照)同已核實嘅公開記錄:
- 宣稱:回填 289 條(55 條帶實測值,其中 6 條係上手實測)。問題:94 條。結論:224 行評分記錄,112 行帶有作者結論。價格:8 個有日期、有來源嘅價格點。發布:31 個事件,2019-02-19 – 2026-10-26。提及:28 個型號-月份,2026-09 – 2026-11。完整行:/api/history;頁面:/history/。
- 價格史係唯一有明確變動嘅維度:宇樹 G1 發布價 $16,000(2024 年 5 月)→ 2025 年 12 月 24 號前跌到 $13,500,淨係減過一次價,以商店存檔截圖為界(2025-10-16 仲係 $16,000;2025-12-24 係 $13,500)。H1 約 $90,000 同 NEO $20,000 各有一個發布點同一個 2026-11-07 觀測點,未見變動。其餘 9 款型號冇公布價:未公布,唔係 0,亦唔列價格行。
- 仍然係 0 嘅項同原因。(1)二手成交價中位價:1 行二手快照入面 0 行帶中位價。人形機械人根本冇二手成交市場——任何可及公開來源都搵唔到:eBay 冇二手 G1 嘅成交記錄,Swappa 冇任何人形型號嘅產品頁,亦冇已公布嘅成交中位價。轉售商報價有(Maverick $17,363、RCSV $21,500),但嗰啲係全新機嘅要價,唔係二手成交價,所以唔記做中位價。下次快照再試。(2)獨立實驗室測量:0。公開來源冇本站口徑嘅結構化獨立實驗室數據;55 條 experience_records 全部係文章原話入面嘅實測值,同實驗室測量分開記、唔混用。(3)4 款型號嘅問題記錄係 0:Agility Digit 4、Boston Dynamics Atlas、Fourier GR-2、Unitree H1——冇已分析文章報告佢哋嘅問題,唔等於測到零問題。(4)4 款型號嘅實測宣稱係 0:Figure 03、Fourier GR-2、Sanctuary AI Phoenix、XPENG Iron——佢哋已分析報道入面嘅宣稱全部冇實測值。(5)doc_changes:0 行——基線攞自 2026 年 11 月 7 號,之後未有變化;下次核查有變化即刻記入。(6)Tesla Optimus 文檔基線:0——tesla.com 對本站抓取返 403;下次快照用渲染抓取重試。
14. 來源
- Vendor pages and press releases (Tesla, Figure AI, Unitree, Boston Dynamics, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, 1X, Sanctuary AI, Fourier, XPENG).
- Trade press: The Verge, Engadget, Wired, TechCrunch, IEEE Spectrum, The Robot Report.
- Hacker News (Algolia API, public, no key), Google News RSS, Bing News RSS, YouTube search pages.