Science fiction always paints a vision of robots cleaning our house. LG it seems has the first such example that isn’t a robo-vac.
Robots are taking over your home, but the good news is they’re helping you clean it. That’s the general idea we’ve seen in the past few years, as we welcome our new robot overlords and have them help out in ways only bribery usually encourages our kids to.
There are sure a lot of them, evident from the knowledge that robotic vacuum cleaners and mops are now snagging Best Picks at our end-of-year awards. But it seems as though these robotic floor cleaners aren’t going far enough.
In fact, this year at CES 2026, LG is demoing the idea of a “zero labour home”. That’s to say, LG’s robotics arm is showing off a robot designed to help with chores that require hands to do its job.
Previewed ahead of the show, LG has now shown its home helping robot “CLOiD” in all its glory: an AI-enabled robot that can move itself around the home on wheels, but also has a torso to spin around and aim itself at tasks, plus two articulated arms with shoulders, elbows, and wrists.
And then it has hands to pick up other items, each hand including five independent fingers with actuators to manipulate items, allowing it to physically hold something.
That may seem like a really awkward way to describe having hands, but the point of CLOiD is that it can use its arms and hands to pick up laundry, fold it, place it down, and move it to a new location. LG’s CLOiD can also get milk from a fridge, put a pastry in an oven, and basically help out around the house.
It can unpack a dishwasher and help out with things humans normally do, and it helps answer a question everyone always asks: when will technology be able to actually help out with physical actions like laundry and dishes and so on?
The head of CLOiD is also interesting, using AI with a combination of vision models trained on thousands of hours of household tasks, allowing it to do other things, such as open doors.
Yes, like raptors, LG’s robot will be able to open a door.
That could well be the point, however, and it looks to create a new type of category for the home. We have just regular “Appliances”, and we also have robotic vacuums and floor washers which have led to “Appliance Robots”. With CLOiD, however, LG has “Robotised Appliances”, and it likely won’t be the last.
“The LG CLOiD home robot is designed to naturally engage with and understand the humans it serves, providing an optimised level of household help,” said Steve Baek, President of LG’s Home Appliance division.
“We will continue our relentless efforts to achieve our Zero Labour Home vision, making housework a thing of the past so that customers can spend more time on the things that really matter,” he said.
Like most things launched at CES 2026, there is no word yet on pricing, nor even availability in Australia. That said, we don’t expect we’ll see a proper release for LG CLOiD in Australia or New Zealand this year, or even possibly next. However when it does come, expect it to be pricey, likely several thousand dollars to tens of.
Right now, it’s simply more achievable and properly cost effective in simply having you fold your laundry yourself.
