Name: Are humanoid robots the next smart home gadget?
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T17:11:30.000Z
Duration: 10 min 48 s
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I've met a lot of robots at the Consumer Electronics show, but

this year, the buzz around home robotics felt different.

There was a sense, a hope even, that humanoid helpers for our homes could be much closer to a reality.

A shift from concept robots that grab the headlines but never materialize towards something that actually launch and quite possibly be useful.

Here in Las Vegas, it felt like Rosie the Robot or Jarvis could finally step out of science fiction and into our homes.

There are two types of home robots I'm hoping to see.

First are the larger, more human like robots that, that can do multiple tasks that are more complicated.

Then there are the smaller, single purpose bots that can maybe do one or two things.

Well, what's changing in home robotics is that these bots are becoming smarter and more capable thanks to AI and appendages.

As all of this comes together, what I think is the most logical next step for a home robot is one that can do my most hated chore, my laundry.

So let's go inside and see if any of these robots are ready to graduate from concept demo to laundry duty.

And when something is everywhere at ces, it's a fairly good indicator that it's heading to our homes next.

We are the zeroth one to build a consumer based humanoid robot.

Renjie Guo, CEO of Xeroth, which made its debut at CES this year, says actuators, control and AI are the key technologies that will make Rosie the Robot a reality.

So actually we need the world model that we cannot pre train or we cannot give a third party maps to them.

You can only sense the world and to decide by themselves.

So he needs a model of the world just like a human.

For example, we stand here with no air, right?

Jupiter is the only full humanoid robot we saw at CES that is specifically designed to do household chores, but

Guo says it needs to learn from you and from training data to understand our homes.

And this is the big challenge robotics companies are working on.

I think for Jupiter, that is more like a people.

For example, if you want to do a certain work, the first thing is that you look, you look that this is a door of the laundry Then we can open it and we will put the clothes in and we close it so we can see and we can.

Jupiter watches you, and then Jupiter can do it.

The second thing is that we have so many movies and short videos on YouTube, on TikTok.

Another way to learn is through teleoperation in your home.

Someone using a Vision Pro to control the robot remotely.

Guo says teleoperation will be necessary for safety.

Jupiter weighs 170 pounds and hurts when it falls on you.

Even if Jupiter learns how to do my laundry, it'll still need someone controlling it to make sure it doesn't injure me.

Leading the conversation around home robots at the convention this year is LG's Cloyd Home Robot.

I facilitate convenience and comfort by orchestrating devices and spaces to manage chores.

It uses much safer wheels rather than legs.

That feels like a big step, except for the laundry was already very neatly laid out.

the conceit that we saw was that the owner went to the gym while Cloyd sorted his laundry for him, did the wash, then folded the clothes at the end.

If a robot could actually do all of those things for me, I feel like that would be something I would really value because it saves a lot of time, but

it took a really long time for it to fold one towel, so I'm not sure how productive it's going to be.

One of the things that I thought was really interesting, though, is in this demo, we saw how the robot was communicating with the appliances in the home.

So it didn't need to press the button on the oven to set the temperature to make the croissants, because it could just communicate with the oven and tell it what temperature to set.

It also communicated with the robot vacuum.

It's kind of working to orchestrate all of the appliances in your home.

Of course, you can do that yourself with an app.

You don't really need a robot to do all of that, but

it was managing everything for you so you don't have to.

It seems more like an appliance in many ways than an actual robot.

Especially because it doesn't have legs, but

the arms and the capabilities that that brings to it, that's what takes it to the next level.

LG says Cloyd is a concept robot and I don't see it shipping anytime soon.

But this approach seems closer to becoming a reality than Jupiter.

SwitchBot's One Row H1 is a budget version of Cloyd, a half humanoid on wheels.

It can interface with Switchbot smart home devices as well as perform some basic tasks.

Also, we're told we only saw it collecting laundry from a living room set and placing it in the laundry machine.

Sometimes SwitchBot's COO Haijo Lin showed me this video of one rows in simulated homes training on how to make a bed and how to do the laundry.

He said they have thousands in a factory training like this.

In the hopes of shipping a useful home robot to customers this year that costs under $10,000, we gave one row buddy, my daughter's stuffed toy to pick up so we could see how it would react to a new item in its demo.

It did pick it up and put it in the washing machine, which is probably not where I actually want my stuffed animal to go.

At every demo we saw, I also asked if we could have the robot open my bottle of laundry detergent or even just pick it up.

But none of them were brave enough to take up the challenge.

Manipulating common household items feels like an essential part of being a useful home robot.

And that's the problem that Alex is trying to solve.

Developed by Werobotics, Alex is an upper half humanoid with hands and arms designed for human like dexterity while being safe to interact with.

So we are focusing on the human dexterity in the carbon level.

If I give it something to do, like I have a bottle, like could it open it?

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Are humanoid robots the next smart home gadget?

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