Coming Soon: A World Where Robots Are Partners in Our Daily Lives

If you’re old enough to have seen “The Jetsons,” a cartoon on TV during its 1962-65 run, or more likely if you’ve watched re-runs with your kids, you’re familiar with Rosey, a domestic U-Rent A Maid robot that collaborates with the Jetsons family in daily activities using natural language.

Well, humanoid robots that help people do their daily chores are coming. According to an Allied Market Research study, the humanoid robot market is expected to reach $609.5 million by 2031—growing at a CAGR of 7.7% from 2022 to 2031.

Goldman Sachs is even more optimistic, predicting the global market for humanoid robots will reach $38 billion by 2035, a more than sixfold increase from the roughly $6 billion for the period forecast three years ago. Among the primary factors expected to boost the growth of humanoid robot markets: monitoring the elderly and patients as well as helping them with daily tasks such as providing medicine on time and assisting with meals.

Recent Announcements

Technology bigwigs are far from inactive when it comes to humanoid robots. In November, Tesla chief Elon Musk said he believed everyone would have at least one of his company’s forthcoming humanoid robots in their homes. Tesla’s Optimus is a 5-foot-8-inch robot weighing 125 pounds that has been designed to help with mundane household chores. Powered by AI, it can walk, climb stairs, lift and carry objects as well as manipulate them autonomously. As he put it, “They’ll serve you cocktails, babysit your kids, walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries.”

Optimus utilizes Nvidia technology, and the carmaker will begin selling its Optimus humanoid robot in 2026.

Meta, a company moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented, virtual and mixed reality, recently unveiled PARTNR, a new research program specifically designed to examine technology for integrating humanoid robots into homes.

PARTNR, an acronym for Planning and Reasoning Tasks in humaN-Robot collaboration, is designed to study human-robot interaction in household activities. At its core, PARTNR provides a mechanism to train social robots through large-scale training in simulation, followed by deployment in the physical world.

A study from the University of Oxford and Japan’s Ochanomizu University found that four out of ten hours of chores currently devoted to unpaid housework and caring responsibilities could be automated within the decade, according to research published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Dr. Lulu Shi, a researcher with the Oxford Internet Institute and departmental lecturer in the Department of Education, University of Oxford, said the study also showed “28% of care work, including activities such as teaching your child, accompanying your child or taking care of an elderly family member was predicted to be automated.” What is more, 44% of housework, including cooking, cleaning and shopping was thought to be automatable.

Mimicking Humans

A humanoid robot resembles the human body in shape. The design may be for functional purposes, such as interacting effectively with human tools and environments, for experimental purposes like the study of how humans propel themselves on two legs or for other purposes.

Figure is a first of its kind AI robotics company with the goal of bring a general purpose humanoid robot to life. Its CEO, Brett Adcock, said he sees the potential to ship 100,000 humanoid robots over the next four years and notes that Figure is focused on two markets: commercial and home. The company’s first publicly named client is BMW, which signed on late last year.

With these companies and others developing humanoid robots, a key question is whether mimicking the human shape really is the best design direction. Proponents of this course of action point out that humanoids are designed to navigate environments made for humans, such as buildings and public spaces.

But it is also true that the human body has its limitations, and copying the design to build machines may only lead us into a technological brick wall.

The electronic components in humanoid robots integrate such subsystems as servo controls, microcontrollers, printed circuit boards (PCBs), sensors, actuators and batteries. Built to measure the movement, location or displacement of an object along a path, position sensing in humanoid robots is needed to detect movement and convert it into signals suitable for processing, transmission or control.

Size and heat dissipation requirements are challenging to meet when integrating these systems into the volume of a human shape while maintaining smooth operation of the system.

Visual sensors and cameras mimic the human visual system and enable the robot to “see” the environment it moves into. The visual sensors capture and convert images into a digital signal that can be analyzed and processed, enabling the robot to make an informed decision based on what it senses in its environment (again, in the same manner humans do).

A robot is a system that can perceive, reason, plan, act and learn. To achieve a range of motion similar to that of humans, servo motors and control systems are deployed throughout the robot. Each motor requires high power density and precise control in a compact space. The motors are distributed throughout the robot’s body in the torso, neck, arms, legs, toes and hands. All embodied by physical AI.