Cartwheel Robotics’ Social Humanoid for the Home

The main assumption about humanoid robotics that the industry is making right now is that the most realistic near-term pathway to actually making money is in either warehouses or factories. It’s easy to see where this assumption comes from: Repetitive tasks requiring strength or flexibility in well-structured environments is one place where it really seems like robots could thrive, and if you need to make billions of dollars (because somehow that’s how much your company is valued at), it doesn’t appear as though there are a lot of other good options.

Cartwheel Robotics is trying to do something different with humanoids. Cartwheel is more interested in building robots that people can connect with, with the eventual goal of general purpose home companionship. Founder Scott LaValley describes Cartwheel’s robot as “a small, friendly humanoid robot designed to bring joy, warmth, and a bit of everyday magic into the spaces we live in. It’s expressive, emotionally intelligent, and full of personality—not just a piece of technology, but a presence you can feel.”

This rendering shows the design and scale of Cartwheel’s humanoid prototype.Cartwheel

Historically, making a commercially viable social robot is a huge challenge. A little less than a decade ago, a series of social home robots (backed by a substantial amount of investment) tried very, very hard to justify themselves to consumers and did not succeed. Whether the fundamental problems with the concept of social home robots (namely, cost and interactive novelty) have been solved at this point isn’t totally clear, but Cartwheel is making things even more difficult for themselves by going the humanoid route, legs and all. That means dealing with all kinds of problems from motion planning to balancing to safety, all in a way that’s reliable enough for the robot to operate around children.

LaValley is arguably one of the few people who could plausibly make a commercial social humanoid actually happen. His extensive background in humanoid robotics includes nearly a decade at Boston Dynamics working on the Atlas robots, followed by five years at Disney, where he led the team that developed Disney’s Baby Groot robot.

Building Robots to Be People’s Friends

In humanoid robot terms, there’s quite a contrast between the versions of Atlas that LaValley worked on (DRC Atlas in particular) and Baby Groot. They’re obviously designed and built to do very different things, but LaValley says that what really struck him was how his kids reacted when he introduced them to the robots that he was working on. “At Boston Dynamics, we were known for terrifying robots,” LaValley remembers. “I was excited to work on the Atlas robots because they were cool technology, but my kids would look at them and go, ‘that’s scary.’ At Disney, I brought my kids in and they would light up with a big smile on their face and ask, ‘Is that really Baby Groot? Can I give it a hug?’ And I thought,…