This app sends a humanoid to clean your home

PLUS: A zero-gravity 4-armed space humanoid

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Joey Liu, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
May 21, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. San Francisco startup Gatsby wants to make humanoid cleaners as easy to book as an Uber: tap an app, pay $150, and one shows up at your door.

Gatsby pitches itself as the “consumer layer” for domestic humanoids, betting that robot labor will soon undercut both human cleaners and single-task gadgets. It’s running a pilot in San Francisco, with other cities listed as “coming soon.”

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • SF startup sends a humanoid to clean your home

  • ETH Zürich unveils 4-armed space humanoid

  • China’s robot-hand king Linkerbot eyes $6B

  • XPENG starts mass-producing robotaxis

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GATSBY

Image source: Gatsby

The Rundown: San Francisco startup Gatsby wants to make humanoids a household utility — booking a full-size Unitree G1 to clean your home for $150 a visit through an app, much like Uber but for a robot that does the dishes.

The details:

  • Gatsby operates as an on-demand cleaning service booked through an app, with a robot handling household chores without any human cleaner present.

  • The flat rate is $150 per clean, regardless of the size of your home, and Gatsby compares that with local human cleaning prices of $150 to $300.

  • The startup is backed by NVIDIA’s Inception program and Entrepreneurs First, and pitches itself as a “consumer distribution layer” for humanoids.

  • In China, domestic robot cleaning is already showing up as a service: human–robot cleaning teams in Shenzhen advertise whole‑home jobs for around $11.

Why it matters: For now, Gatsby is running a small pilot in San Francisco, with other cities “coming soon.” But if this test and others that follow can drive down costs and failure rates, humanoids could undercut both human cleaners and single-purpose bots in a market where trust, liability, and a $300 robot vacuum are already hard to beat.

ETH ZURICH

Image source: Orbit Robotics

The Rundown: ETH Zürich unveiled HELIOS, a four-armed humanoid designed specifically for zero-gravity work — grabbing, bracing, and assembling structures in orbit where two arms and Earth-calibrated reflexes aren’t enough. It arrives May 27.

The details:

  • HELIOS comes out of Orbit Robotics, an ETH Zürich Focus Project, with a skeletal black chassis and cable-driven pulleys instead of industrial actuators.

  • The robot’s four arms and hands are pitched as a super-tool for astronauts, fusing controls, perception, electronics, mechanics, and biomechanics.

  • It arrives as Tesla is reportedly developing space-hardened Optimus processors and Foundation is pitching humanoids for lunar base assembly.

  • Apptronik, fresh off NASA’s 300-pound Valkyrie program, is also targeting the ISS with its Apollo robot.

Why it matters: Most humanoids chasing space applications are Earth-first designs being retrofitted for orbit. HELIOS flips that logic, treating zero gravity as the baseline. This student project crystallizes where NASA and industry are headed: robots that take the most dangerous work in space out of astronauts’ hands.

LINKERBOT

Image source: Linkerbot / Images 2.0

The Rundown: Chinese dexterous robot-hand champion Linkerbot is lining up a Hong Kong IPO that could raise several hundred million dollars at a ~$6B valuation, aiming to double its recent $3B, Bloomberg reports.

The details:

  • The company says it has already shipped over 10K dexterous hands and scaled to mass-produce more than 1K high-DoF hands per month.

  • Linkerbot claims more than 80% of the global market for high-DoF robotic hands that can thread needles and manipulate tools.

  • By focusing on the gripper layer rather than full humanoids, Linkerbot has turned itself into a critical component supplier for China’s robot ecosystem.

Why it matters: Backed by Ant Group and state-linked money, Linkerbot is muscling in as the default hand supplier for China’s robot boom. In a world where humanoids practically live or die by their hands, Linkerbot is carving out a critical edge in a market where rivals like Tesla and Figure continue to develop their own hand systems in-house.

XPENG

Image source: XPENG

The Rundown: XPENG began mass-producing an L4 autonomous taxi built on its GX platform — claiming the title of China’s first automaker to ship a fully in-house, production-ready robotaxi and putting itself squarely in Tesla’s lane.

The details:

  • The vehicle runs four proprietary Turing AI chips (3,000 TOPS combined) and XPENG’s VLA 2.0 end-to-end vision model, with no LiDAR or HD maps.

  • XPENG landed Guangzhou L4 test permits in January and carved out a dedicated robotaxi business unit in March.

  • Paid pilot services are targeted for late 2026; fully driverless operations — no safety driver, no remote minder — are slated for 2027.

  • The GX-based robotaxi doubles as a rolling showroom for XPENG’s “physical AI” stack, sharing its core model with its IRON humanoid and flying car.

Why it matters: XPENG is trying to differentiate beyond EV hardware by tying its vehicle lineup to an in-house autonomous driving stack. The robotaxi gives the company a real-world test case for that strategy, while also positioning it against rivals in China’s EV market and companies like Tesla pursuing camera-first autonomy.

QUICK HITS

Hyundai Motor Group plans to deploy more than 25K Boston Dynamics Atlas robots across its U.S. plants by 2028, ramping Atlas production capacity to 30K units a year.

UBTECH Robotics launched UWORLD, a new consumer-focused humanoid brand aimed at bringing its industrial humanoid tech into homes.

South Korea launched a government-backed project to invest $34M through 2030 in developing a Korean humanoid.

China has reportedly more than doubled the efficiency of producing J-20 stealth fighter components by converting a Chengdu plant into a robot-run “dark factory.”

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software, live in the Netherlands, is expanding into Europe with new approval in Lithuania and more countries queued up.

Chinese robotics firm Xynova unveiled a 23-DOF robotic hand with built-in vision and touch sensors aimed at giving humanoids more human-like dexterity.

Figure AI’s Figure 03 humanoids are now eight days into a live-streamed, round-the-clock warehouse run, having autonomously sorted more than 230K packages.

Boston Dynamics’ latest Atlas demo shows the all-electric humanoid using whole-body, AI-driven coordination to carry a 100-pound mini-fridge.

Faraday Future raised $25M in new financing to fund its pivot into robotics, with the company now aiming to ship 1,500 robots by the end of 2026.

Dozens of empty Waymo robotaxis had reportedly been circling a residential cul-de-sac in Atlanta, with some 50 vehicles entering the dead-end street in a single hour.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team