China’s robotics pioneers are rapidly expanding beyond the usual factory settings and into more challenging terrain: the unstructured, dynamic and complex world of domestic household chores. GigaAI unveiled the country’s first general-purpose household humanoid robot model last week. The SeeLight S1 was developed in collaboration with Hubei Humanoid Robot Innovation Center and Hubei Humanoid Robotics Industry Alliance. The robot will be given to families to test free of charge in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, as early as the first half of 2027, said Zhu Zheng, GigaAI’s CEO.
In a demonstration video published on the company’s WeChat account, the two-armed, wheeled robot was seen chopping vegetables, frying eggs, loading a washing machine, hanging laundry, making a bed and opening curtains. The developer aimed to lower the hardware price to below CNY100,000 by June 2027, halving its current cost, Zhu said. He said he expected household robots to make significant breakthroughs in commercialization and embodied AI model capabilities by 2028.
Unlike humanoid robots that work on factory production lines and rely on hard-coded algorithms and pre-configured routines – the most common deployment of robots at present – the S1 is designed to autonomously understand tasks and plan its execution trajectory with the help of embodied artificial intelligence models. A fleet of 100 S1s will be trialed at housing reserved for employees in hi-tech industries starting later this month, before the pilot in Wuhan households next year – which will focus on families that have elderly members, children or pets. For safety concerns, Zhu said that the machine was equipped with a “compliant control mechanism” that immediately freezes the robot when it encounters pets or children.
The household robot market, which reached an estimated USD41 billion in global size last year, is expected to grow annually by 20% by 2027, according to research firm LeadLeo. Robot vacuum cleaners currently dominate the market, and no humanoid models are commercially available for household errands, though some major developers in China have started to deploy their products at laboratories and factories. Unitree Robotics Founder and CEO Wang Xingxing said last year that the use of humanoid robots in industrial and agricultural scenarios was fast developing. But while there was “significant potential” for home use, it remained “challenging” at this stage, he said.
Compared to industrial settings, “home environments are non-standardized, where a robot faces an environment that changes every day”, said Guo Renjie, Founder and CEO of robotics engineering company Zeroth. Last week, Shenzhen-based OneRobotics, whose mission statement is to “bring AI robots into every household”, announced a CNY45 million deal to help collect data for various scenarios, including household chores, elder care and in retail spaces, the South China Morning Post reports.
