Technologies

Everyone Wants a Robot That Folds Laundry. LG Brought Its First One to CES 2026

LG’s new AI-powered home robot CLOiD promises to empty the dishwasher, fold laundry and perform light cooking tasks.

Robots that can perform our least favorite domestic chores, such as washing dishes, folding laundry and cooking, have been a popular fixture in the public’s imagination since The Jetsons. However, 63 years later, the attempts to actually produce one have mostly resulted in hilarious videos. LG is hoping to break that trend this year at CES 2026.

LG, one of the best-known home appliance brands, is set to unveil its first-ever multitasking autonomous home robot, CLOiD. The launch could mark a major tipping point, prompting other blue-chip home appliance brands to enter the fast-emerging multifunctional home robot market.

According to the company, CLOiD is an AI-powered home robot that purports to do far more than vacuum, mop or pick up socks. While existing home robots are engineered to perform tasks such as floor cleaning, pool and lawn care, the CLOiD uses AI and vision-based technology to automate more complex household tasks, such as «retrieving milk from the fridge, placing a croissant in the oven for breakfast and folding and stacking garments after laundering.»

In an email, LG tells us that CLOiD is designed to perform and coordinate household tasks across connected home appliances using LG’s ThinQ ecosystem. This means you’ll need LG appliances for it to function as a go-between that executes several mundane daily tasks.

«CLOiD is intended to reduce the time and physical effort required for everyday chores,» LG said in a statement on Sunday.

While we’ve yet to see the robot in action, the AI-enabled home robot will be demonstrated publicly for the first time this week at CES 2026. CNET eagerly awaits a first look at CLOiD ahead of the massive tech show and will report back following the demo.

How LG CLOiD is designed

«The LG CLOiD consists of a head unit, torso with two articulated arms and a wheeled base equipped with autonomous navigation. The torso can tilt to adjust its height, enabling the robot to pick up objects from knee level and above,» LG said.

Each arm has seven degrees of freedom, matching the mobility of a human arm. The shoulder, elbow, and wrist allow forward, backward, rotational, and lateral motion, while each hand includes five independently actuated fingers for fine manipulation. This configuration allows LG CLOiD to handle a wide range of household objects and operate in kitchens, laundry rooms and living areas.

The wheeled base uses autonomous driving technology derived from LG’s experience with robot vacuums and the LG Q9. This form factor was selected for stability, safety and cost-effectiveness, with a low center of gravity that reduces the risk of tipping if a child or pet makes contact.

CLOiD’s head serves as a mobile AI home hub

The head serves as a central intelligent control center for the household. It houses a chipset acting as LG CLOiD’s central processor, along with a display, speaker, cameras, multiple sensors and voice-powered generative AI. Together, these components enable the robot to interact with people using natural speech and expressive visual cues, understand users’ home environments and daily routines, and autonomously manage connected appliances based on what it learns.

Integration with ThinQ and ThinQ ON

CLOiD’s capabilities expand significantly through its integration with LG’s smart home ecosystem, including the AI home platform ThinQ and hub ThinQ ON. This connectivity allows CLOiD to orchestrate a wider range of services across LG’s various appliances.

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Technologies

Yes, This Swimming RoboTurtle Is Adorable. It Also Has an Important Environmental Mission

Beatbot is best known for making pool-cleaning robots, but it was its swimming robot turtle that won our hearts at CES 2026.

Few things in life have made me feel more privileged and awestruck than the opportunity to swim with sea turtles in their natural environment. The way in which these gentle creatures navigate through their underwater world with their deliberate and careful fin strokes is utterly mesmerizing to watch.

It’s a distinctive style of movement — so much so that when I saw Beatbot’s RoboTurtle swim across a water tank on the show floor at CES 2026, I knew that this wasn’t simply just a pool cleaner robot with turtle features tacked on. This was a studied example of biomimicry in action.

The reason for this is that the company’s engineers went on a two-month expedition to study sea turtles in their natural environment, Beatbot’s Eduardo Campo told me as we watched Turtini (the team’s affectionate nickname for RoboTurtle) splash around in its pool. «We did a lot of motion capture, like the things they use in movies, because we need to develop those joints that it has,» he said.

This isn’t RoboTurtle’s first time at CES — it also appeared in 2025 as a static concept. This is the year, however, it’s found its fins, so to speak. Not only can it swim, but it can also respond to hand gestures: I throw it an OK gesture, and it dances in response. But as cute and limber as it is, RoboTurtle is a robot with an important mission.

RoboTurtle is an environmental research tool, built with input from researchers and NGOs, which can go where humans or other machines cannot for fear of disturbing complex and delicate underwater ecosystems, particularly coral reefs. It can move silently and naturally in a way that won’t scare wildlife, monitoring water quality and fish numbers with its built-in camera.

«One of the groups that we’re working with, they want to study the coral reefs in near Indonesia,» said Campo. «There was a very big incident over there with a boat that came up onto a coral reef and it disrupted the environment, [so] they want the least intrusive robot possible.»

The group wants to deploy RoboTurtle for certain periods every year to monitor the recovery of the coral and monitor the fish population, he added. Beatbot is currently training the built-in AI to give RoboTurtle monitoring and recognition skills.

At CES, I watched RoboTurtle paddle about only on the surface of the pool, but it can also dive down up to five meters. However, it needs to resurface to send data and its GPS signal back to base, much like a real turtle that needs to come to the surface to breathe. This also gives it a chance to recharge via the solar panel on its back.

Even though I was impressed with RoboTurtle’s swimming ability, Campo estimates that the Beatbot team is still a year and a half away from perfecting its technique, with the robot ready for full deployment in between three to five years.

CES 2026 is a show where tech with a real purpose feels scarce, so it sure is refreshing to see a company use its expertise to build something designed with a sustainable future in mind. It might be a while until we see RoboTurtle take to the seas, but I’m glad that I got to witness it at this stage of its journey.

Technologies

These Tiny Robots Are Smaller Than Grains of Salt and Can Think, Move and Swim

Despite their size, the robots can navigate liquids, respond to their environment and operate without external control.

Robots smaller than a grain of salt? It sounds like science fiction, but researchers have developed autonomous microrobots that can move through liquids, sense their environment and operate independently using only light as a power source.

The microrobots, developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan, measure roughly 200 by 300 by 50 micrometers. Yet they can detect temperature changes, follow programmed paths and function independently for months at a time.

Their work was reported this week in two scientific journals, Science Robotics and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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«We’ve made autonomous robots 10,000 times smaller,» senior author Marc Miskin, assistant professor in electrical and systems engineering at Penn Engineering, said in a statement. «That opens up an entirely new scale for programmable robots.»

Powered entirely by light, the robots don’t move using mechanical limbs. Instead, they generate tiny electrical fields that push ions (electrically charged particles) in fluid to create motion, an approach better suited to the unique physics of the microscopic world, where traditional motors don’t work.

Unlike earlier microrobots, these devices combine sensing, computing, decision-making and movement in a single, self-contained system at an extremely small scale.

Previous efforts in microrobotics have often relied on external controls, such as magnetic fields or physical tethers, to guide movement. These new microrobots, however, incorporate their own miniature solar cell-powered processors, allowing them to respond to their environment, communicate through patterned movements visible under a microscope and carry out tasks without outside direction.

Potential applications include monitoring biological processes at the cellular level, supporting medical diagnostics or helping assemble tiny devices. Because each robot can be mass-produced at very low cost, the technology opens new avenues for research and engineering at scales that were previously unreachable.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, Jan. 7

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Jan. 7.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I thought today’s was a tough one — I couldn’t solve too many of the Across clues and had to move on to the Down clues to fill in the answers. Also … look at the answer for 3-Down! Are we using Gen Z slang now as if everyone knows it? Anyway, if you want all the answers, read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.