What role does software play in humanoid robots? Is it more important than hardware?

You can imagine a humanoid robot as a human being.

Hardware is the robot's "body." This includes its metal skeleton, motors (equivalent to muscles), sensors (eyes, ears, touch), wires (nerves), and battery (heart). Hardware determines the robot's "physical limits":

How fast can it run? How high can it jump? This depends on the power of its leg motors and structural design.
How delicate can its hands be? Can it pick up an egg without crushing it? This depends on the dexterity of its hands and the precision of its force sensors.
How far can it see, and how clearly can it hear? This depends on the quality of its cameras and microphones.

In essence, hardware is the robot's "talent" or its fundamental foundation, determining the lower bound of "what it can do."

Software, on the other hand, is the robot's "brain and soul." It is responsible for processing all the information collected by the hardware and commanding the hardware to act. The role of software is mainly reflected in these aspects:

Perception and Understanding: Just having eyes (cameras) that see a bunch of pixels is useless. Software algorithms must be able to recognize "this is a table" or "that is a person" from these pixels and understand the surrounding environment.
Decision-making and Planning: When it sees an obstacle ahead, should it go around it or stop? Upon receiving the command "get me a bottle of water," it needs to plan a path from its current location to the refrigerator and then back to you. This is the brain making decisions.
Control and Coordination: Walking is perhaps where the importance of software is most evident. To avoid falling, the robot requires software to constantly calculate and adjust the angles and forces of dozens of joints (motors) throughout its body at millisecond speeds to maintain dynamic balance. This process is extremely complex, much harder than we imagine, and entirely thanks to software.
Learning and Interaction: Robots can understand your speech, converse with you, and even learn new skills by observation (e.g., watching you fold clothes once and then learning how to do it). These are capabilities endowed by advanced software, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI). This part is its "soul."

So, is it more important than hardware?

This question is like asking, "For a human being, which is more important: the brain or the body?"

The answer is: Neither can be absent, but software determines the robot's ultimate potential and value.

For example:

A robot with top-tier hardware but terrible software is like a "vegetative state" person who is physically strong but mentally simple. It might have the most powerful motors and the most dexterous hands, but it can't even walk a few stable steps, let alone complete complex tasks. It's just an expensive model.
Conversely, a robot with super AI (software) but poor hardware is like a genius confined to a bed. It has countless brilliant ideas in its mind and can talk to you about anything, but its body can't move, rendering it useless.

Therefore, the two complement each other. Hardware is the stage, and software is the actor.

However, if we absolutely had to say which is "more" important at this stage, or which presents a greater challenge and bottleneck, it would undoubtedly be software.

Because today, manufacturing sufficiently flexible and powerful robot hardware is no longer the most difficult task; many laboratories can achieve it. But the real challenge lies in how to write intelligent enough software (especially general artificial intelligence) to enable this "body" to perceive the world, make decisions, and complete tasks as smoothly and intelligently as a human.

So you can understand it this way: Hardware determines whether a robot "can become a superhuman," while software determines whether it "is a toddling infant or an intelligent adult." Currently, most of our robots are still striving to move from "infant" to "child," and this is almost entirely driven by software and algorithms.