This Home Robot Clears Tables and Loads the Dishwasher All by Itself - WIRED
A handful of other startups are currently hustling to develop and deploy more capable robots, including systems designed to work in ordinary homes.
Key takeaways
The most recent developments in humanoid robotics include UBTech’s launch of mass production for its Walker S2 model, announced on 17 November 2025, with several hundred units slated for phased deployment in industrial settings after the company secured $112 million in robot orders and a $22 million data‑center contract; the robot features a dual‑battery system that lets it autonomously swap depleted packs for near‑continuous operation. On 19 November 2025, Newsweek reported that the Phantom MK1 humanoid, unveiled at the Future Investment Initiative summit, is being positioned as a potential “ultimate warrior” for the U.S. military, backed by roughly $10 million in government contracts and plans for thousands of units in the next 12‑18 months. The latest breakthrough, reported on 20 November 2025, comes from OpenMind, which introduced BrainPack—a backpack‑sized hardware‑and‑software platform that delivers real‑world intelligence to robots and humanoids by integrating perception, control, memory and autonomous decision‑making in a single edge‑processing unit. Together, these announcements illustrate a shift from laboratory prototypes toward commercially produced, autonomous, and mission‑ready humanoid systems across industrial, defense, and research domains.
A handful of other startups are currently hustling to develop and deploy more capable robots, including systems designed to work in ordinary homes. Physical Intelligence, Skild, and Generalist are all working on robot models that can adapt to new situations using this approach. 1x recently revealed a humanoid home robot, though this system still requires teleoperation to perform some tasks. I recently watched as Memo, a new home robot from a company called Sunday Robotics, made coffee in an open-plan kitchen in Mountain View, California.
Memo looks like something out of Wall-E, with a gleaming white body, two arms, a friendly cartoonish face, and a red baseball cap. Rather than using legs as a fully humanoid robot would, Memo moves around using a wheeled platform and changes its height by sliding up and down a central column atop that platform. AgiBot is using AI-powered robots to do new manufacturing tasks. Smarter machines may transform physical labor in China.
Anthropic’s Claude Takes Control of a Robot Dog
Anthropic believes AI models will increasingly reach into the physical world. To understand where things are headed, it asked Claude to program a quadruped.
Gemini 3 Is Here—and Google Says It Will Make Search Smarter
Mentioned in this article