Is there a humanoid robot for household chores yet? The record

Folding towels: one maker has published a full-autonomy claim, dated August 12, 2025, on a robot no household can buy. Loading a dishwasher: shown, with no reliability figure attached. Cleaning a bathroom: printed on a live $20,000 order page and demonstrated nowhere I can find.

Ask whether there is a humanoid robot for household chores and the answer usually comes robot by robot, which flatters the robots. Sorted chore by chore, with dates, the record gets thin fast and becomes much easier to check yourself.

The chore ledger, dated

Every row links to its primary source. Where a row says nothing has been published, I went looking and came back empty.

Chore	Best published demonstration	Date	Who or what was driving	Buyable by a household
Fold towels	Figure, Helix Learns to Fold Laundry	2025-08-12	"fully autonomously," per Figure	No
Fold shirts and shorts	Physical Intelligence, π0 (lab arms, not a humanoid)	2024-10-31	Autonomous policy	No
Load a dishwasher	Figure, Helix Loads the Dishwasher	2025-09-03	Not stated on the page	No
Tidy a living room	Figure, Helix 02 Living Room Tidy	2026-03-09	"long horizon autonomy," per Figure	No
Tidy a bedroom, make a bed	Figure, Helix 02 Bedroom Tidy	2026-05-08	Two robots, no central coordinator	No
Fetch an object, open a door	1X, Redwood AI	2025-06-10	Onboard model	Preorder only
Fold a shirt	Tesla Optimus clip	2024-01-15	Musk: "cannot yet do this autonomously"	No
Clean a bathroom	Nothing published that I can find	n/a	n/a	n/a
Cook a meal	Nothing published as autonomous	n/a	n/a	n/a
Vacuum a floor	Roomba	2002-09	Autonomous	Yes

The one full-autonomy claim, and what surrounds it

Figure's laundry post carries the strongest sentence anyone in this category has published: "This is the first instance of a humanoid robot with multi-fingered hands folding laundry fully autonomously using an end-to-end neural network" (Figure, August 12, 2025). Take it at face value. Then read the frame around it.

The item being folded is a towel, pulled from a mixed pile. Towels are the forgiving end of laundry: rectangular, no buttons, no sleeves, no socks to pair. Figure's follow-ups do widen the range, from the dishwasher post in September 2025 through a living room tidy in March 2026 (spray bottle, towel, pillow throws) to a May 2026 bedroom demo in which two robots "reset a bedroom in under two minutes" with "no shared planner between them, no message passing, no central coordinator."

What none of those four posts contain: a success rate, a number of attempts, a run duration, or a playback speed. I checked each page for all four. The engineering is real and the write-ups are careful, and they still leave out the only number a household would ask for, which is how often it works.

Chris Paxton, who leads AI innovation at Agility Robotics, surveyed the current clothes-folding results for IEEE Spectrum on November 19, 2025 and supplied the words the coverage keeps dropping: "While they're slow and imperfect, everyone can start to envision how this technology becomes the thing that we all want." Slow and imperfect, from inside the industry, about the best work in it.

Figure publishes no consumer price and runs no order page; its named customers are companies, most recently BMW. So the best chore autonomy on record belongs to a machine no household can buy at any price (Figure 03 tracker).

Brett Adcock says Figure 02 has been demonstrated in fully autonomous operation on BMW's production line and permanently deployed at the plant (@adcock_brett, 2025-04-06)

One more entry worth keeping straight: the other serious laundry result is not on a humanoid. Physical Intelligence's π0, published October 31, 2024, pulls shirts and shorts out of a hamper and folds them, and busses a table of dishes and cutlery, running on stationary and mobile arm platforms with no legs involved. Legs are not what was holding laundry back.

The order page and the research post describe two different machines

1X sells the only humanoid a household can order right now, so its wording carries more weight than anyone else's. The NEO product page names five jobs: "Walk to Person," "Put Away Dishes," "Clean Bathroom," "Get the door," "Laundry." The same page carries the disclosure every one of those has to be read through: "For complex tasks NEO doesn't know, an Expert from 1X can remotely supervise its actions at scheduled times."

Now compare the technical post. 1X's Redwood AI announcement of June 10, 2025 describes the onboard model as "capable of performing end-to-end mobile manipulation tasks like retrieving objects for users, opening doors, and navigating around the home," and mentions picking toys and clothes up off the ground. Retrieving, opening, navigating, picking up. No folding, no dishwasher rack, no bathroom. The storefront list and the capability list do not match, and Expert Mode is the bridge between them.

Prices and status from 1x.tech/order: $20,000 outright or $499/month, a $200 fully refundable deposit, and the page still reads "US Deliveries start 2026." No customer delivery has been independently verified. The full breakdown sits in the Neo preorder explainer, with live status on the Neo tracker page.

Optimus: the shirt, and the reply underneath it

The most-watched humanoid chore clip of the modern era is Optimus folding a t-shirt in January 2024. Musk supplied the footnote himself, on the same day: "Important note: Optimus cannot yet do this autonomously, but certainly will be able to do this fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment (won't require a fixed table with box that has only one shirt)" (@elonmusk, January 15, 2024).

That is the most complete teleoperation disclosure any maker has volunteered for a chore video, and the promise attached to it is now two and a half years old. The October 2024 "We, Robot" event drew criticism afterward for undisclosed remote operation of the units mingling with guests. On January 28, 2026, Musk admitted no Optimus robots were doing useful work at Tesla, six days after telling Davos that public sales would begin by the end of 2027. The running ledger is in Elon Musk's robot claims: the dated archive. The Optimus tracker page still shows no price and no order channel.

The chores with no record at all

Bathrooms. Cooking. Anything with standing water, grease, a hot surface, or a mess whose shape nobody can predict in advance. I could not find a published demonstration of a humanoid autonomously cleaning a toilet, a shower or a sink, from any maker, at any date. "Clean Bathroom" appears on a live order page and nowhere in the evidence.

Cooking is the same hole with one curiosity attached: the FAQ on 1X's order page carries the question "Can my NEO cook?" The answer text would not load for me, so I will not characterize it. The June 2025 capability post does not mention cooking either.

None of this makes the robots useless or the makers liars. Deformable objects, wet surfaces and unstructured mess are the genuinely hard part of this problem, which is why hands rather than legs are the bottleneck.

Five questions for the next chore video you see

1. What is the date on it, and has anything shipped since?
2. Who or what is driving? If the post does not use the word autonomous, assume a pilot.
3. What is the success rate, over how many attempts?
4. Is the clip at real speed? If the page does not say, the clip is not evidence about how long the chore took.
5. Can a household buy that exact robot? On the current record, every autonomous chore demo answers no.

Where that leaves August 2026

One published full-autonomy chore claim, on towels, from a company that sells to businesses. Several strong tidy-up demos with no reliability figures attached. One orderable home humanoid whose own AI post stops at fetching things and opening doors. And a whole category of chore, the wet and dirty kind, with no record at all.

The chore robot that actually works in houses is still the wheeled single-purpose one introduced in September 2002, which cannot fold anything. Everything above is real progress toward replacing it, and none of it is yet a product a household can buy and point at a laundry pile. The week a demo arrives with a date, a success rate and a checkout button on the same page, this article changes. Until then, the word doing all the work is worth understanding on its own: how autonomous are humanoid robots, really.