The robot that does all your housework has been a decade away for sixty years. What has actually arrived is a series of machines that each do one thing, and that pattern is the realistic forecast.
What exists
Floor cleaning, which was the first and remains the largest category. Lawn mowing. Window cleaning. Pool cleaning. Litter trays. Each solves a defined task in a constrained environment with a fixed success criterion.
None of them is intelligent in any general sense. They are appliances with navigation.
Why general purpose is hard
A home is an unstructured environment full of objects the machine has never seen, arranged in ways that change daily, containing people and animals that move unpredictably.
Handling that requires perception, manipulation and judgement that current systems do not have at consumer prices. Industrial robots work because the environment is controlled. Homes are the opposite.
What arrives next
More single-task machines, extending into laundry folding, dish loading, and basic tidying – each a narrow problem solved with dedicated hardware.
Better navigation and object recognition in the machines that exist, so they handle more variation without intervention.
And the connective layer: a home where the appliances coordinate rather than each operating alone.
The economics
A device costing a few hundred that reliably removes one recurring chore is an easy purchase. A device costing many thousands that attempts several chores unreliably is not. Manufacturers learned that from the first wave and have not forgotten.
The humanoid distraction
Human-shaped robots make compelling demonstrations and are the wrong form for most household tasks. The floor cleaner is a disc because that is the right shape for the job. Expect the same logic to continue.