The robots are coming! Kind of. One of the big trends in the tech world is humanoid, autonomous robots for your household. The dream of not having to load the dishwasher or washing machine yourself is seemingly closer than ever.
Advances in robot technology are making them on the verge of becoming products you can actually buy. It’s a rapidly evolving area, and there are a lot of companies lining up to be the ones to finally fulfil Douglas Adams’ description of robots as your plastic pal who’s fun to be with.
Adrian Flux is always at the cutting edge of insurance, so let’s take a look at some of the robots you can actually buy, pre-order, or at the very least dream about.
Boston Dynamics Atlas
Boston Dynamics could probably be described as the de facto leaders in the current humanoid robot world without too many arguments. They’ve been developing robots for many years, and if you remember seeing a video of a humanoid robot doing something cool over the last couple of decades, there’s a very good chance it’s one of theirs.
Atlas is their current humanoid model, and while it’s technically available to buy, it’s targeted very much at industrial use. It is, however, a very useful benchmark in terms of evaluating the robots offered by other companies.
In particular, its battery life of four hours and ability to carry up to 30kg (or be able to lift up to 50kg instantly) is about the best performance currently available. Although if it is carrying, then that battery life drops to two hours. Regardless, it’s pretty impressive, and while you won’t be seeing them as personal robots, it’s worth bearing those figures in mind going forward.
1X Neo
The Neo is a cute little guy with camera eyes designed to look soulful and a fabric outer layer that looks like a turtleneck onesie. It’s one of the few robots on this list with actual pre-orders and a targeted release date of 2026 – although that is just for the US, with the 1X currently aiming for 2027 for international releases. It’ll cost you either $20,000 (around £14,800) outright or $499 (around £370) a month with a $200 deposit.
It’s supposed to be capable of carrying 24kg or 8kg with a single hand. While the company says that it’s able to do somewhere between 60-70% of tasks autonomously, exactly how accurate that is remains to be seen given there are no confirmed deliveries at the time of writing.
However, for any task that it doesn’t know, you can book a remote operator who will take over your Neo and complete it for you, which will also help it to learn the actions required for the future.
Essentially, any early adopters will be helping the company to build its software by providing data for how to complete tasks.
Neura 4NE1 Mini
The 4NE1 Mini is a compact humanoid with a design from Porsche. Its big innovation is cloud-based learning sharing. Basically, this means that any time any of the Neura robots learn a new task, that information can be accessed by any of them.
Obviously, it also has remote control functionality, and while Neura is pretty bullish on its autonomous AI capabilities, it remains to be seen exactly how much human control it will need to learn new tasks in novel environments.
It’s got a maximum carrying capacity of just 3kg and a runtime of two and a half hours, so it’s going to be best suited for light tasks and just general bragging rights that you’ve got a robot in your house.
Unitree R1
About as close as you’re going to get to an entry-level robot here in Space Year 2026 and indeed going forward into 2027, the R1 comes in a few different versions, with the cheapest model around £3,500 and the educational version about £10k. Sounds great, right? Well, there is a catch.
The cheapest version is non-programmable and has a number of impressive, but set-in-stone actions it can do. Those actions do include acrobatic flips and shadowboxing moves, but this base version comes with fixed fists so there’s a limit of actual interaction, and its tricks are all triggered by the operator – which is at least the owner, rather than a techie in a call centre somewhere in the world.
The educational version gets actual hands and the ability to add programming, although this obviously requires technical knowledge, so if you’re looking for a household helper straight out of the box, then this isn’t the best choice by any stretch of the imagination. If you’re looking for something that can do backflips, though, the R1 should be at the top of your list.
Unitree G1
Similar to its more bare-bones sibling, the G1 comes in a few different varieties, but with a price tag about double that of the R1. Like the R1, the base G1 is not programmable, and while it can do its backflips and so on, those are pre-set actions. It does at least have the option to add usable hands.
It’s also worth pointing out that security researchers discovered a flaw affecting some Unitree robots that allows them to be hacked. It definitely highlights the problem of being an early adopter of technology.
Figure 03
Heading into extremely uncertain territory here, but the 03 is Figure’s big pitch for a domestic robot. And it certainly looks the part, with a smooth shiny black faceplate concealing a screen that displays minimalist icons to denote activity.
Like the Neo, it has a soft fabric outer skin, all powered (currently) by the company’s bespoke Helix 02 AI model. The catch is, you can’t buy it. Actually, you can’t pre-order it either. It is currently (allegedly) in the very early stages of real-world testing in select locations. Its big public debut was appearing at a White House event hosted by Melania Trump earlier in 2026 where it walked out with the first lady, played a pre-recorded speech and then walked away again.
Tesla Optimus
Originally announced in 2021 with the first prototype shown the following year, Optimus is supposed to be Elon’s big game-changing personal autonomous robot. So far, all of the predicted dates when it would be released have come and gone, similar to the predicted dates for when SpaceX would land on Mars. At the time of writing, there are suggestions that Tesla is building a production line at its Fremont facility to start building them, but the most generous timelines suggest that it could hit the market some time in late 2027.
There’s also a very good chance that it won’t be the fully autonomous robot of your dreams because they are working within the same constraints of technology as all companies, and it’s likely that it will still have to rely on remote operation for many tasks.
