‘Home Humanoid’ NEO Beta Revealed That Jogs, Carries Bags ‘Naturally’

Norwegian American AI robotics company 1X has announced its latest creation: NEO, a humanoid robot designed for home use that could begin shipping as soon as 2025.

This preproduction model will be tested in selected homes later this year, with plans to ramp up production to thousands of units in 2025 and eventually millions of units by 2028.

NEO is 5.41 feet tall and weighs 66 pounds. It can walk at 2.5 miles per hour and run at 7.5 miles per hour. The robot boasts a 44-pound carry capacity and can operate on a single charge for 2-4 hours.

But what can it do?

In the long term, the robotics company envisions NEO performing chores like cleaning or organizing, supporting individuals with mobility challenges, fetching items and providing companionship.

The website shows images of the beta version of NEO opening doors and cleaning surfaces, while the recently released teaser video shows the robot responding to a human’s command and picking up a backpack.

While specific pricing details weren’t provided, Børnich suggested that NEO could be relatively affordable: “We can manufacture this at a cost of a relatively affordable car. And then I’m not talking about a car that someone in Silicon Valley would buy.”

Newsweek reached out to 1X via email for details on pricing.

Bernt Børnich, the CEO and founder of 1X, emphasized the importance of safety in NEO’s design.

“It’s all about making sure that there’s as little energy in the system as possible,” Børnich said. Unlike traditional industrial robots, NEO uses a tendon-driven system inspired by human anatomy, allowing for more compliant and safer interactions.

“We create robots that are safe, capable and affordable, so we can create robots that can live and learn among us,” said Csaba Hartmann, VP of Manufacturing Ops & Engineering at the robotics company.

Hartmann said they took inspiration from Honda’s ASIMO, a humanoid robot first introduced in 2000. ASIMO could walk, run, climb stairs, recognize faces and voices, and perform simple tasks like carrying objects. It was considered a milestone in robotics, but its development was discontinued in 2018 when Honda decided to focus on more practical robotic applications.

1X envisions a rapid deployment timeline for NEO. Børnich outlines their plans: “2025 will be the year of scaling this. 2026 is kind of, like, still early adopter, scaling, manufacturing, gathering all the data to make the systems intelligent enough to be really, really genuinely useful.”

The plan, said the CEO, is for “thousands of robots in 2025, tens of thousands in 2026, hundreds of thousands in 2027, millions in 2028.”

The company plans to scale up production significantly with NEO. The robot’s predecessor, Eve (a much simpler robot with wheels for legs and pinchers for hands) peaked at about 10 to 20 units per month.

“Manufacturing wise, for NEO, we’re gonna do like five to 10x of this in the factory we’re building right now,” said Børnich.

Eric Jang, VP of AI at 1X, highlighted the challenges of developing a robot for unstructured environments like homes.

“If you ask a robot to flip on a light switch, you don’t know if it even touched the switch. You don’t know if the switch turned on. You don’t know if it fell over,” he said, illustrating the complexity of the task.

1X’s approach to AI development for NEO involves collecting diverse data from real-world interactions.

“We collect a large, diverse set of robot data with our humanoids, both Eve and NEO,” Jang explained. “We train a robotic foundation model that captures all kinds of knowledge about the world, and then we turn that into a helpful assistant.”