CES promises the robot butler, but delivers better Roombas instead

If you listen to the CES hype machine this year, you might think that robots are finally ready to take over your domestic duties. To some extent that’s true, but take note of the plural: there’s no single robot ready to take over all of your household chores yet, but an army of them just might.

You might have had one of these single-purpose robots in your home for years already, of course. Robot vacuum cleaners have long been capable of automating a single, specific task, and it’s no surprise that it’s the same companies behind those bots pushing home robots forward now.

Last CES, robot vacuums got arms, and 2026 is apparently the year of legs. Roborock announced the Saros Rover, a vacuum on two articulating, wheeled legs, which can jump over obstacles, navigate tricky terrain, and climb stairs. Dreame showed off its own legged concept vacuum, the Cyber X, at IFA last September, and it’s back at CES this week with its four tank tread legs in a design I could only describe as “extremely threatening.” More mundanely, Anker is launching a Eufy robovac that doubles as a diffuser, spraying fragrance as it goes. And almost every manufacturer in the industry is now launching robotic mowers and pool cleaners, expanding the navigation tech behind their vacuums into new domains.

Then there’s the wave of robot toys and pets, from Ecovacs’ fluffy puppy LilMilo to Tuya and Robopoet’s Fuzozo, a Star Trek Tribble that has its own cellular connection so you can get AI-enabled emotional support on the go. Or FrontierX’s Vex, an autonomous robot camera that follows your pet around to both film — and edit — a video about their day. Someone’s even made a real-life WALL-E, which does… something. That one doesn’t look all too practical, but it sure is cute. As for Samsung’s cute projector bot Ballie, which was supposed to go on sale in 2025, it’s still MIA, and Samsung hasn’t even mentioned it at this year’s show so far.

It’s neat that you can task a little robot with mowing your lawn or playing with your pet, but it’s not quite the future we were promised by the likes of The Jetsons’ Rosey the Robot, or Fantastic Four’s H.E.R.B.I.E. It’s not just that the new wave of CES announcements aren’t the expressive humanoid robots that have long dominated science fiction, it’s that they each only do one thing. Want a robot to vacuum your floors? You got it. But if you want your lawn mowed and pool cleaned too then that’s not one robot, it’s three — and a fourth if you want something that looks cute too.

This is echoing a trend we’ve seen in industrial robotics for some time. Production lines and warehouses aren’t yet adopting humanoid robots that move from task to task, but they are investing heavily in focused, specialized robots that can carry out a single task more efficiently than any human worker can. I’ve seen that first hand: when I visited online grocery company Ocado, whose robots handle online orders for Kroger across 14 US states, I saw robots for moving crates, packing bags, or loading trucks, but nothing that was designed to do more than one of those jobs.

“When you have a controlled environment that you can change and manipulate you’re generally better off with a specific tool for a specific job,” deputy CEO James Matthews told me, explaining that the “adaptability” central to the appeal of humanoid robots isn’t a priority for Ocado, especially since any humanoid design bakes in many of the same limitations that hold humans themselves back.

Of course, that’s all well and good in an industrial environment. If Ocado designs a single robot that’s great at moving crates from one place to another, and another that can load those crates onto trolleys, it can still go ahead and build thousands of each to use worldwide, and make it cost-efficient to do so. The math feels a little different at home. If the great automated future involves buying eight different robots for eight different tasks, each more expensive than the appliance it’s designed to replace, I’m not sure how many people will sign up.

The industry hasn’t given up on the do-it-all bot just yet though. Boston Dynamics used this CES to unveil the production version of its humanoid Atlas, which parent company Hyundai plans to roll out into its own factories. In the home, LG showed off its humanoid robot CLOiD with a live demonstration of it ponderously loading a towel into a washing machine, while SwitchBot says its Onero H1, which can apparently fold laundry and make breakfast, “represents a shift toward robotics that can adapt to a wide range of domestic scenarios.”

But these are the outliers, and like Amazon’s and Tesla’s humanoid bots, they’re still more hype than substance. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas won’t enter the workforce until 2028 — and its entirely static CES debut didn’t inspire too much confidence. SwitchBot’s Onero is supposedly close to launch, with preorders starting “soon,” but the live demos on its booth showed a slow, simple robot that’s not ready to do your laundry yet.

LG’s CLOiD is more impressive, but still a prototype, with no sign of a real release, and LG is still hedging its bets. CLOiD is only one part of its “Zero Labor Home” vision, which it imagines will include networks of appliances that “operate as a single AI system.” That’s a more realistic outlook, closer to what we already have than the fantasy of a cheerful android capable of taking over my chores.

We’re still not close to Rosey the Robot running our homes, but in the meantime the robot revolution is coming one bot at a time.