Figure's Helix 02 now tidies your living room
PLUS: 7K robot vacuums hacked, Samsung SDI's humanoid battery, and Germany's Agile One makes its debut
Welcome back to your Robot Briefing
Figure AI's Helix 02 robot just tidied an entire living room — autonomously. Spraying surfaces, wiping with a towel, scooping toys into a bin, pressing the TV remote to turn off the TV, tossing a pillow back onto the couch. No new algorithms, no special-case engineering. The same neural system that cleaned a kitchen last month simply learned the new tasks by adding data.
If that trajectory continues — kitchen one month, living room the next — the question worth asking isn't "can robots handle unstructured home environments?" but "how many rooms until the cost case closes for facilities that aren't homes?"
In today's Robot update:
Figure's Helix 02 now tidies your whole living room
Snapshot: Figure AI just published a new demo of Helix 02 doing something no home robot has done at this level before: autonomously tidying an entire living room — spraying and wiping surfaces, scooping toys into a bin, pressing the TV remote to turn the screen off, and tossing a pillow back onto the couch, all using a single neural system with no new algorithms added.
Breakdown:
Takeaway: A single system cleaning a kitchen last month and a living room this month — without re-engineering — puts home robotics on a steeper timeline than most observers expected. The capabilities now exist; the remaining gap is cost, safety certification, and whether a general-purpose system trained in structured demos can handle the unpredictability of a real household.
DJI pays $30K after hacker hijacks 7,000 robot vacuums
Image Source: There's A Robot For That
Snapshot: A French hobbyist testing a PlayStation controller hack on his own Romo robot vacuum accidentally seized control of 7,000 Romo vacuums worldwide — gaining access to live camera feeds, microphones, and home floor maps through a single flaw in DJI's cloud infrastructure. DJI has patched the issue and agreed to pay $30,000 as a bug-bounty-style reward.
Breakdown:
Takeaway: Any business deploying camera-equipped robots on premises — in warehouses, offices, or retail environments — should treat cloud security as part of the procurement checklist, not an afterthought. A single misconfigured permission can turn an efficiency tool into a surveillance liability.
Samsung SDI builds the first battery designed for a humanoid's chest
Snapshot: Samsung SDI is unveiling a pouch-type all-solid-state battery specifically designed for humanoid robots at InterBattery 2026 in Seoul this week — the first production-intent battery built to fit inside a robot's chest compartment, with rapid power response for sudden movement loads and mass production targeted for H2 2027.
Breakdown:
Takeaway: Battery suppliers moving from "EV cells adapted for robots" to "batteries designed from the start for humanoid constraints" is a maturity signal for the industry. When Samsung SDI is building a dedicated SKU for your chest cavity, the deployment timeline is probably closer than analyst projections suggest.
Germany's Agile Robots brings its humanoid to Hannover Messe
Snapshot: Munich-based Agile Robots — a 2,000-employee robotics company with 15 global sites — is making the first public appearance of its humanoid robot Agile One at Hannover Messe 2026 in April, positioning it not as a standalone product but as part of a full factory automation ecosystem.
Breakdown:
Takeaway: A DLR-backed company with 2,000 employees and an existing industrial automation footprint entering the humanoid market is different from a venture-backed startup. Agile Robots brings paying customers, running production lines, and a distribution network — which is what's been missing from most humanoid launches so far.
Other Top Robot Stories
Lotte began selling Unitree's humanoid robot G1 for 31 million Korean won (~$21K) alongside 11 other Chinese-made robots, with E-Mart adding 14 robot types in parallel — together selling roughly 170 units in under six weeks, signaling that consumer retail channels for humanoid robots are now open in South Korea.
Healinno Tech introduced its metaFlow waterjet surgical robot for urological procedures — an AI-powered system already deployed at Peking University First Hospital that uses high-speed waterjet dissection instead of electrosurgery, eliminating thermal damage to surrounding tissue and standardizing complex minimally invasive workflows.
Chinese companies now hold over 90% of the global humanoid market, with roughly 13,000 units shipped in 2025 — a dominance fueled by government demand from state-owned enterprises, deep manufacturing capability, and software investment, according to a new Omdia analysis.
NASA's Valkyrie humanoid returns to Johnson Space Center after spending nearly a decade at the University of Edinburgh, where researchers improved its walking stability, manipulation, and AI perception — with its architecture having since influenced Apptronik's Apollo, now moving toward industrial deployment.
🤖 Your robotics thought for today:
Figure's Helix 02 went from kitchen to living room in one month with zero code changes — if scaling a home robot is now a data problem instead of an engineering problem, who's actually collecting the data?
What's your take?
Until tomorrow,
Uli
