At the recent World Humanoid Robot Games 2026 in Beijing, robots sprinted, boxed, played football and tackled tasks inspired by factories, restaurants and emergency situations. The robot Tiangong Ultra even completed the 100 metres in 8.64 seconds, quicker than Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record.
But if we really want to know whether humanoid robots are ready for everyday life, a far less glamorous challenge may tell us more: doing the laundry. Can a robot take a crumpled T-shirt from a laundry basket, work out which way round it is, fold it neatly and recover when the sleeve slips from its hand?
No robot system can yet reliably handle the whole laundry process, from carrying a basket to the washing machine and sorting clothes for different programmes to taking them out, hanging them to dry, folding and ironing them. Even folding remains a challenge: robots need to cope with clothes of different shapes, sizes, materials and levels of creasing.
Running fast is difficult, of course. A humanoid has to coordinate many joints, keep its balance and generate powerful movements without falling over. The task itself, however, is fairly clear. The robot knows where to go, the track is predictable and the finish line does not suddenly change shape.
Laundry is a very different problem. A shirt may be inside out. One sleeve may be hidden underneath another garment. A pair of trousers may be twisted around a towel. Fabric is also soft and constantly changing shape. Pick up one corner of a T-shirt and the rest of it moves.
Humans deal with this without giving it much thought. We shake a shirt out, notice where the sleeves are, feel when the fabric slips and adjust our grip almost automatically. For a robot, every one of those little actions is a problem to solve. This is why an everyday chore can reveal more about robot intelligence than a spectacular athletic feat.
A useful household robot cannot simply replay the same movement again and again. It has to notice when reality is different from what it expected and adapt. That’s important to consider because humanoid robots are increasingly discussed as future helpers in homes and care settings, as well as factories and warehouses.
A factory production line can often be arranged so that parts arrive in predictable positions. A family home is not like that: clothes, toys and furniture move around constantly, while people, children and pets make the environment even less predictable.
Why one robot cannot simply copy another
There is another difficulty. Once one robot learns how to fold a shirt, it might seem obvious that we should simply transfer that skill to every other robot. Unfortunately, physical skills do not work like an app that can be installed on any machine.
Imagine a specialist laundry robot with rigid arms, overhead cameras and grippers designed specifically for fabric. A humanoid may have cameras in its head, five-fingered hands and different joints and balance constraints. The same movement could therefore produce a very different result.
A fixed robot arm can reach forward without worrying about falling over. A humanoid may have to move its hips, legs and feet just to keep itself stable while reaching across a table.
Sensors are important too. One robot may have sensitive touch sensors in its fingers. Another may rely mainly on cameras.
Some knowledge can still transfer. One robot can teach another something about what a shirt looks like, where its shoulders are likely to be, what a good fold looks like or how to recognise when a sleeve is trapped underneath. The receiving robot still has to work out how to carry out those ideas with its own hands, joints, cameras and body.
Research projects such as Open X-Embodiment are exploring exactly this problem by pooling experience from many different robots. The project has brought together more than one million real robot trajectories from 22 different robot types. The hope is that robots can learn useful patterns from one another rather than starting from zero every time.
What should count as progress?
The Humanoid Robot Games are valuable because they make robotics visible and show how quickly the technology is moving.
We should simply be careful about what those demonstrations prove. For robots intended to live and work alongside us, better questions might be: can the robot deal with an unfamiliar object? Can it notice that it has made a mistake and recover without human intervention? How long can it keep working before someone has to step in?
These measures are unlikely to produce viral videos. They are, however, much closer to the abilities that will determine whether humanoid robots become genuinely useful.
A robot that can run 100 metres faster than the human world record time is impressive. A robot that can take a messy basket of laundry, sort it, fold it and recognise when things have gone wrong may tell us far more about whether general-purpose robot intelligence has really arrived.
The most important race for humanoid robots may not be against the clock. It may be against the laundry pile.
- is a Senior Lecturer in Electronics Robotics & Control Engineering, Cardiff Metropolitan University
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
