Fancy coming home to the laundry all done and put away, house tidy and piping-hot meal ready to eat on the table?
1X's 'Neo' robot could be your best houseguest yet.
With big ambitions to have hundreds of these humanoid machines in homes next year, thousands in 2026, millions in 2027 and billions in 2028, the Norwegian company is certainly ambitious. Its kit looks the part too - a flexible 'sock' covers all the messy machinery stuff, it's 5ft 5 tall (half a foot shorter than Tesla's Optimus) so can get into spaces better, weighs just 30kg (less than 5 stone) so won't hurt the dog (as much) when it knocks it over - and it has AI setup for learning what you do around the house so that it can mimic.
What I like is that they're determined to go 'consumer-first'. A lot of robotics companies (Figure, Boston Dynamics, Tesla) are mainly focused on industrial uses, specialising in building cars (mostly) or tech. That's where the quickest payback is, they think, with Figure already in BMW factories speeding things up.
However, 1X thinks that the best way to get their robots to learn the most is by plonking them into as many homes as possible, as quickly as possible. Their bullish CEO, Bernt Bornich, reckons a robot can be yours for the cost of 'a relatively affordable car' - though there will inevitably be ongoing software costs to keep it working.
Still, it's happening people - the robots are coming. Save the ironing.
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