Just when you thought your smart speaker was getting a bit too big for its boots, LG Electronics has decided to well and truly up the ante, announcing it’ll be pulling back the curtain on a proper, full-blown home robot – the LG CLOiD – at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. The tech titan is pitching this as a monumental stride towards its fabled ‘Zero Labour Home’ vision, a utopian future where you can finally chuck your chore wheel in the bin and let a machine tackle the daily grind. LG assures us CLOiD is engineered to conquer a vast array of household tasks, theoretically freeing up your precious time for more pressing matters, like pondering whether you’ve effectively rendered yourself redundant.
Hold your horses, this isn’t merely another robotic vacuum cleaner that’s had a personality chip shoved in its circuits. LG has kitted CLOiD out with a pair of articulated arms, each one boasting a rather impressive seven degrees of freedom for genuinely human-like motion, and hands sporting five individually actuated fingers for truly advanced dexterity. The grand ambition here is for CLOiD to tackle delicate and precise tasks that would send lesser robots into a right old fumble. And the whole shebang is juiced by what LG has rather charmingly dubbed “Affectionate Intelligence” – an AI system cooked up to learn, interact, and fine-tune its responses over time, all to dish out more personalised support. Whether that “affection” stretches to forgiving your egregious habit of leaving socks scattered across the living room floor, however, is anyone’s guess.
CLOiD’s impending debut is a crystal-clear signal that LG is executing a shrewd strategic pivot, firmly planting its flag in robotics as a crucial growth engine. The company has already set up a dedicated HS Robotics Lab to sharpen its competitive edge to a razor point and is vigorously chasing down partnerships with other robotics firms. This rather momentous announcement lands just ahead of what’s shaping up to be a truly robot-heavy CES 2026: Vegas prepares for AI & robot overlords , where it seems every major tech player is absolutely hell-bent on plonking a friendly (or at the very least, remarkably useful) automaton into every nook and cranny of our homes. For those keen to see if the hype truly holds up, LG’s booth (#15004) in the Las Vegas Convention Center will be the place to be.
Why this is a bit of a game-changer
The relentless push for a truly general-purpose home robot is, quite frankly, the consumer tech industry’s equivalent of a full-blown moonshot. While we’re all rather accustomed to single-task bots like those whizzy vacuum cleaners, a multi-purpose humanoid capable of navigating a chaotic home and deftly manipulating a whole smorgasbord of objects is nothing short of a monumental engineering conundrum. LG’s CLOiD, then, represents a proper, no-nonsense stab at cracking this particular nut, nudging the industry beyond mere niche gadgets and towards that long-promised, almost mythical vision of a truly automated home assistant. Its eventual triumph – or, let’s be brutally honest, its spectacularly public face-plant – at CES will serve as an absolutely critical benchmark for the entire future trajectory of domestic robotics.
