A few days ago, we reported on Midea’s desire to make a shift away from home appliances into new technologies. Well, they didn’t hang about as they’ve unveiled a new humanoid robot.
Midea is the parent of parent company of Kuka Robotics, which unveiled a new humanoid robot prototype at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai.
The introduction underscores Midea’s ambitions in embodied intelligence, what they refer to as the convergence of robotics, AI and real‑world agency.
To date, household robotics abilities are limited in general to simple chat devices like Echo’s, Homepods and the like but also increasingly robotic vacuum cleaners, window cleaning robots and so on. These devices have limited abilities or are “single task” oriented for the most part.
But Midea’s strategy is to deliver service robots capable of doing more general chores such as laundry, loading and unloading dishwashers, folding clothes, and more.
But, Midea are nto the only company working on this, it’s actually a “thing” just now partnered with all the AI stuff we’re bombarded with but there’s one thing that might massively slow adoption in domestic homes, apart from these being proven to work and not kill us in our sleep, Its that even with lower production costs that are being mooted, analysts estimate its industrial robots may sell for under $25,000, versus Tesla’s Optimus at more than $30,000.
That kind of money might be okay in an industrial setting but to buy a robot that costs more than a small car, we can’t see many people jumping at it.
