Tech Life: Humanoid robots for household chores — how close are we?

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In brief: Meet the humanoid robots designed to help with household chores.

What this is about

This episode looks at the push toward humanoid robots for everyday tasks — a trend driven by better computer vision, cheaper sensors, and rapid progress in robotics control software.

Why humanoid robots are hard

A humanoid shape is flexible, but it introduces tough engineering constraints:

  • Balance and safety: moving around people, pets, stairs, and clutter.
  • Dexterous hands: gripping irregular objects reliably is still difficult.
  • Power + runtime: doing physical work drains batteries quickly.
  • Cost: making a robot both capable and affordable is the bottleneck.

Where we’ll likely see them first

Before they become common in homes, we’ll probably see deployments in:

  • warehouses and factories (controlled environments)
  • hospitals and care settings (assisted tasks)
  • hospitality and retail (simple, repeatable routines)

Takeaway

The biggest question isn’t whether robots can do chores in demos — it’s whether they can do them safely, every day, with low failure rates.

Sources

n English