A Week With a Home Robot
It folded laundry and lost to a doorway. Notes from seven days of living with an early unit.
Why it matters
Demonstration data is the bottleneck. Every staircase and doorknob was designed for human proportions, which is the real reason humanoid form factors keep attracting capital — they fit the data that already exists.
Sim-to-real is a tax you pay twice. The simulator that trains the policy never quite matches the friction, the lighting, the wear. Closing that gap is most of the engineering effort.
Embodiment raises the stakes. A language model that is wrong produces a bad sentence; a robot that is wrong produces a bad outcome in a room with people standing in it.