The robots are coming, slowly: humanoids at CES 2027
The robots are coming. Slowly. Humanoids were the photo of CES 2026: boxing, dancing, folding laundry in a fake living room. They will be the photo of CES 2027 too. Here is what was real, what was a puppet show, and the one question we are bringing to every robot booth in January.
What actually happened on the floor
Unitree drew the crowds. Its G1 humanoid boxed and ran dance routines all week, and CNBC put the price at about 70,000 dollars. The boxing is more than a stunt if you know what to look for: getting hit and staying up is a balance-recovery, motion-planning and impact-tolerance demo, done in public, over and over. Unitree’s bigger H2 is pitched at industrial work, not your kitchen.
LG brought the home story. Its CLOiD humanoid was shown doing real household jobs in a staged apartment: folding laundry, loading a dishwasher, prepping food with normal appliances. LG frames it as a step toward a “zero labor home.” Before the show it had not said which of those tasks will actually be available at launch, or even whether the production robot walks on legs or rolls on a base. Keep that in mind when you see the clips.
The honest takeaway from the people who spent the week with them: most home-focused humanoids are still too slow for daily life, and a lot of the smoothest demos were teleoperated by a human off to the side. One analyst put the safety problem in a sentence: you cannot plan for a kid running into the robot, or the robot running over the dog.
Why it is the featured topic anyway
CTA says robotics-interested attendance hit about 19,600 at CES 2026, up 26 percent in a year, and it is pushing robotics and physical AI as a featured topic for 2027. “Physical AI” is the industry’s phrase for the thing that happened last year: the models that learned to write and talk got put in bodies. Whether those bodies are humanoid or a box on wheels is a separate argument, and CES is where that argument gets settled in public.
The FUNN question
Every booth is going to show us a robot doing a chore. We are going to ask a different question: can it do something fun? Not a backflip on a stage with a tether. Can it catch a ball you throw at it without a script? Can it follow you down a sidewalk? Can it stand on a skateboard and not die? The robot that can improvise is the one that is actually close.
Our own interest is more specific. 4D VIEWR puts digital characters on real floors and tables, and our Boxman runs around your living room through the phone screen today. Watching a physical humanoid try to do the same job tells us how far off the merge is, where a hologram on your table and a robot on your floor are the same product.
What we expect in January
- More Chinese humanoids at lower price points. Unitree and AgiBot led last year and the field behind them is deep.
- Fewer teleop demos, or at least more honesty about them. The press caught on in 2026.
- Robot dogs everywhere, because they already work.
- At least one company shipping a real date and a real price for a home humanoid. We will believe the date when the robot folds our hoodie.
Sources (checked October 2026): CNBC: humanoid robots take over CES · The Robot Report: LG CLOiD · Interesting Engineering: 9 humanoids at CES 2026 · TechCrunch: the weird robots of CES · Robot Today: CES 2027
