TL;DR
A robot that picks up the kids' toys, straightens the couch pillows, runs the vacuum and fetches a snack has been built, at a reported cost under $15,000. Carnegie Mellon researchers unveiled Pixel, a wheeled, two-armed home helper reported to cost under $15,000 to build, and they taught it chores by having people do the work with handheld tools first, then letting the robot copy them. It is a research robot, not something for sale, and the account comes from a secondary report of two new papers. The part that could matter most for households: the team says an open-source release is "coming soon," which would let other labs and builders start from the same cheap body instead of a $20,000 one. Apple, meanwhile, has research software teaching a humanoid to find its way around rooms it has never seen. To see our odds on when a home robot at this price does chores with no human backup, and the timeline of breakthroughs that leads there, subscribe.
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