Robots in the home, 2026: what actually works
The home robots that work all have one job, wheels and no conversation, from a $279.99 Roomba to a $2,299 pool cleaner. The only arm doing chores at a mass-market price is bolted to a robot vacuum, and it cannot lift anything over 300 grams.
There is a rule that sorts every robot in the home, and it is unglamorous. The narrower the job, the better the robot works. A machine that does one bounded task in one bounded space is a solved product you can buy off a shelf. A machine that promises to do whatever you ask, anywhere in the house, is either a companion that does not do chores or a preorder with a human operator behind it.
Appliance prices below come from the makers' own stores.
The tier that works: one job, wheels, no arms
These are appliances. They navigate a bounded space, do a single repetitive task, and never claim to be your friend.
| Job | Product | Price (2026-08-07) | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Floors | iRobot Roomba 105 Vac + AutoEmpty dock | $279.99 (list $449.99) | Vacuums, returns to the dock, empties itself |
| Litter box | Litter-Robot 4 | from $699 | Sifts after each use, logs it in an app |
| Windows | Ecovacs Winbot W2S | $399.99 (W2S Omni $599.99) | Sticks to glass by suction and cleans it |
| Lawn | Segway Navimow i105 | $799 | Mows up to 0.125 acre with no boundary wire |
| Pool | Beatbot AquaSense 2 Ultra | $2,299 (list $3,150) | Surface, floor, walls and waterline, cordless |
Nothing on that list talks to you, and that is the point. It is also the biggest category in consumer robotics by a distance nobody in the humanoid business likes to quote. iRobot alone has sold more than 50 million devices to date, and its new owner had already manufactured over 20 million robot vacuums of its own. Goldman Sachs' 2030 base case for humanoids is 250,000 or so units shipped that year, "almost all of which would be for industrial use" (Goldman Sachs, February 2024). One company's crumb-eating discs, over about two decades, outnumber every humanoid the most optimistic mainstream forecast expects to ship in 2030 by roughly 200 to 1.
A mature category does not mean a safe company, though. iRobot, the firm that invented this tier, filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 in Delaware on 2025-12-14 and told shareholders in its own announcement that they "will experience a total loss and not receive recovery on their investment." It came out in January 2026 as a private company wholly owned by Shenzhen Picea Robotics, its secured lender and its supplier. Roombas kept working through all of it because the filing promised "no anticipated disruption to its app functionality," which was a decision somebody made, not a property of the hardware.
The only household arm you can actually buy is bolted to a vacuum
If you want to see exactly where household manipulation stands at a price a normal person pays, look at the Roborock Saros Z70. It is a robot vacuum with a folding five-axis arm, listed at $2,599.99 and selling for $1,299.99 on Roborock's US store.
What the arm does, per Roborock's own product page: it picks up socks, sandals, crumpled tissues and towels, and a built-in weight sensor "prevents it from lifting items over a safe threshold (300g)." Roborock says 108 objects are pre-programmed, with room for 50 more via the app.
Three hundred grams is about ten ounces. A full mug is out. A shoe with a rubber sole is borderline. A dinner plate is a no. That is the ceiling of out-of-the-box household manipulation you can buy in 2026, it costs $1,300, and it comes attached to a machine whose real job is still vacuuming. Every video of a robot fluidly folding laundry or unloading a dishwasher is showing you something that is not on sale, and often something with a person driving it.
Figure demonstrates Helix 02 performing whole body, end-to-end living room cleanup (@Figure_robot, 2026-03-09)
The companions: real products, different job
The second tier that genuinely works sells presence rather than labor. Nobody in it claims to do chores, which is exactly why the products survive contact with a real house.
- Desk companions. Eilik is $139.99, runs entirely offline, has no account and nothing to cancel. EMO is $279 and cloud dependent. Vector 2.0 is $199.99 with its brain rented at $11.99 a month. Ten of these are orderable right now between $60 and $799, mapped in the desktop robots category guide.
- Robot pets. Casio's Moflin is $429, has no face, and carries no subscription in the US. Joy for All companion pets are $159.99 for the cat and $179.99 for the pup, no fees and no wifi. Sony's aibo is the expensive end, above $3,000, with a three-year cloud plan included and $300 a year after that.
- Eldercare companions. ElliQ is $249 up front plus $39 to $59 a month, which is $717 to $957 in the first year, and it is free to qualifying seniors through several state and county aging programs.
The research on that last group is better than the marketing usually is. A 2025 meta-analysis in The Gerontologist pooled 19 studies and 1,083 participants and found social robots reduced loneliness in older adults with an effect size of -0.59 (Mehrabi and Ghezelbash, 2025). The same paper reports the effect is larger in care settings than for seniors living independently, larger in Japan and Turkey than in the United States, and flags funnel-plot asymmetry, so read -0.59 as moderate-to-large and probably a bit generous. If you are buying for a parent, the companion robots for seniors guide works through which of these actually fits which situation.
The tier that does not work yet: arms, legs and promises
One full-size humanoid takes consumer orders in 2026. The 1X NEO is $20,000 outright or $499 a month with a $200 refundable deposit, and 1X states on its own order page that for tasks NEO has not learned, an expert from 1X can remotely supervise its actions at scheduled times. A stranger occasionally seeing through your robot's cameras is part of the product, not a bug in it.
Everything else with legs that you can actually buy is a developer platform. A Unitree G1 is $13,500 and backordered, shipping billed separately at $300 to $1,200, and Unitree's own page tells individual buyers to understand the limitations of humanoid robots before purchasing. Out of the box it walks and balances. What it does after that is whatever you write. The full sort of who ships, who demos and who has no product at all is in what exists versus what is demoed.
Four checks before you spend anything
- Count the jobs it claims. One task, in one bounded space, is the profile of everything on the working list. A robot marketed as generally helpful is selling you the unsolved problem.
- Find out where the brain lives. If the useful behavior runs on somebody else's server, you are renting it. The offline products (Eilik, Joy for All, Moflin) keep working when a company stops.
- Price the year, not the sticker. $39 a month is $468 a year. $499 a month is $5,988 a year. Multiply first, then compare.
- Try to complete the checkout. If the flow ends at a deposit, a waitlist or a contact form, you are looking at a plan rather than a product. The consumer robot graveyard records what happens to plans that miss a funding round: six robots, five makers, one recurring cause of death.
A humanoid fails three of those four today. The $279.99 Roomba passes all four, which is how one company shipped 50 million machines while the $20,000 one still has no independently verified delivery.
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