China’s robotics pioneers are rapidly expanding beyond the usual factory surroundings and into more challenging terrains: the unstructured, dynamic and complex world of domestic household chores.

GigaAI unveiled the country’s first general-purpose household humanoid robot model on Wednesday, the SeeLight S1, in collaboration with Hubei Humanoid Robot Innovation Centre and Hubei Humanoid Robotics Industry Alliance.

The robot will be given to families to test free of charge in Wuhan, the capital of China’s central Hubei province, as early as the first half of 2027, said Zhu Zheng, GigaAI’s CEO, according to an article published on Thursday in local newspaper Changjiang Daily.

In a demonstration video published on the company’s WeChat account, the two-armed, wheeled robot was seen chopping vegetables, frying eggs, loading a washing machine, hanging laundry, making a bed and opening curtains.

The developer aimed to lower the hardware price to below 100,000 yuan (US$14,700) by June 2027, halving its current cost, Zhu said. He said he expected household robots to make significant breakthroughs in both commercialisation and embodied AI model capabilities by 2028.

Unlike humanoid robots that work on factory production lines and rely on hard-coded algorithms and pre-configured routines – the most common deployment of robots at present – the S1 is designed to autonomously understand tasks and plan its execution trajectory with the help of embodied artificial intelligence models.

A fleet of 100 S1s will be trialed at housing reserved for employees in hi-tech industries starting later this month, before the pilot in Wuhan households next year – which will focus on families that have elderly members, children or pets.