Nobody likes doing the dishes or tidying up after wayward teenagers, but home help can often be costly. However, scroll through social media and you might be fooled into believing a new dawn is at hand. Humanoid robots recently completed a half-marathon in Beijing in record-breaking time and slick videos of bots doing tasks around the house are being shared by humanoid robotic companies. So where do you line up to get your own friendly automated helper? Turns out it’s trickier than you might think.
“Right now in the UK it is difficult, but not impossible, to buy humanoids,” says Jonathan Aitken, a robotics expert at the University of Sheffield. The ones that are close to being available tend to be those that are in the headlines, such as Tesla’s Optimus and 1X’s Neo bots. Others, which have garnered less publicity, but are nonetheless interesting bits of hardware, like Unitree’s G1 humanoid robot, which costs a smidgen less than £20,000, can be in your home later this summer. While a UBTech Walker E is three times the price.
