The clock started

For years the home-robot question had a comfortable answer: someday. This month it got less comfortable. Unitree — which shipped over 5,500 humanoids in 2025, more than every U.S. maker combined — now lists elder care as a target domain and is filing for a $600 million IPO. GigaAI's SeeLight chops vegetables and makes beds. Figure keeps signing commercial deployments that quietly buy down the cost curve.

None of this is a robot you can put in your father's kitchen tomorrow. Unitree's own affordable machine is penciled for 2030, and "penciled" is doing real work in that sentence. But the language has shifted from "if" to "at what price, and when" — and that is a different conversation than the one we were having a year ago. The honest read for caregivers: nothing ships this year that helps you. The clock that decides whether something ships by 2030 has quietly already started.