I watched IFA’s opening from my laptop in Armenia. My teammates were already in Berlin, jumping from booth to booth. It didn’t take long before robots seemed to be everywhere. Four-legged machines wandered past camera crews. Nearby, a humanoid wrote characters with a brush while people waited to watch. My dog Theia would have gone nuts if animals had been allowed at IFA and she’d seen Vbot’s SuperDog.
Every year at IFA, I expect to see another robot and end up writing about a vacuum with a slightly better map. IFA 2026 gave me a few robots worth a second look, but one detail kept bothering me after the demos. Some of the machines I liked could run into legal trouble once they leave the show floor.
The novelty only gets you so far. I wanted to know if any of the robots make sense outside a trade show, either at home or at work. For Europe, I also looked at how easy they are to buy and what happens to the data they collect while running.
A robot that maps your floor plan, hears your kitchen and knows its own position to the centimeter has built a record of your life as a side effect of cleaning your hallway. I don’t think that makes any of these robots villains. I do think it belongs in the buying decision, next to suction and battery life, rather than three clicks down in a privacy policy.
Calligraphy is the demo, and I’d normally roll my eyes at a party trick. Not here.
Chinese calligraphy demands that a hand modulate downward force, brush angle and speed at the same moment, and get all three right through a single stroke or ruin the character. AgiBot’s OmniHand 3 Ultra-M pulls it off by throwing out gearboxes entirely. Twenty active degrees of freedom, direct drive, no tendon transmission between motor and finger, which means the motors feel brush drag at the paper instead of inferring it from position encoders. Visuotactile sensors in all five fingertips watch the fingertip skin deform and convert that into contact location and force.
Mounted on a 173 cm, 55 kg platform with a full-body touch sensing layer and a 360-degree microphone array, the A3 is the most technically impressive machine anybody showed in Berlin, and I’d say so even after reading everything below about where its data could end up. Omdia put AgiBot first in global humanoid shipments for 2025 on 39% share, so the engineering has volume behind it.
The catch arrived in July, when the FCC added foreign-made advanced robotic devices to its national security Covered List and effectively shut new AgiBot models out of the US. Europe issued no equivalent ruling. That gap is the entire reason AgiBot came to Berlin looking so keen.
Most robot quadrupeds are research platforms wearing a consumer face. SuperDog isn’t.
It has been in mass production since May, has reached thousands of households, carries CE certification, and opened European pre-orders during the show. Under the fur, so to speak, it runs D-Robotics Sunrise AI silicon, the same computing platform behind a long list of home robots on the floor this week.
I’d buy one of these before I’d buy any humanoid at the show, and the reason is boring. Four legs solve a solved problem. Two legs are still a research project that occasionally falls over.
PrimeBOT looks a bit like a toy when it switches from two legs to four. Then you think about what happens when it hits stairs, gravel, or a doorway. The robot can handle those situations, while also following people and filming without someone behind the camera. PrimeBOT also has more than 15 camera moves and a mode that teaches kids the basics of prompting and working with AI.
CEO Tian Hua told the press that the first robot most people own will live in the living room rather than a warehouse. I agree with the idea, but I’m not convinced the timing is anywhere close. Between the two, I’d pick the T1. The 88 cm Q1 is more ambitious, with 22 degrees of freedom, more than 10 martial arts routines and plenty of ways to tweak its look, voice and personality. I’m still looking at it and seeing a developer kit with a nicer pitch.
Filming is the feature I’d use. Following me around a hike with 15 camera moves has an obvious purpose. Learning kung fu from a knee-high robot does not.
TCL calls the hey AiMe the world’s first family companion-education robot. I’ll leave the “world’s first” part alone. The sensor setup is more interesting, with more than 20 sensors, 10 degrees of freedom for expression, and autonomous navigation. Its guided-play system also puts the child at the center, rather than treating learning as an extra feature.
I’d take expressiveness over raw power in a kid’s robot. A simple head tilt or a good reaction can make a child want to use it again.
For families who want a first robot that earns its charging dock, the hey AiMe is the one I’d choose out of everything Berlin showed, with the caveat that I’d want the microphone controls documented in plain language before it moved into a bedroom.
The original ROMO gave people plenty of reasons to worry about putting a connected robot in the house. Security flaws exposed thousands of units, along with floor plans, camera feeds, and microphone access. Some attacks could even give someone control of the robot. DJI released fixes, but I still think about that history when I look at ROMO 2.
The ROMO 2 comes as either the transparent P2 or the opaque A2, with a long list of upgrades. It can detect 2 mm obstacles such as cables and glass, climb 4 cm steps, and pull up to 36,000 Pa on carpet. The brush and mop arms reach farther too. But I’d take the quieter motor over most of those numbers. An 85% noise cut sounds useful when you’ve spent an afternoon trying to work with a robovac screaming across the rug.
Local Data Mode is the bit that interests me most. It cuts the vacuum off from the internet, stops photos and camera feeds from syncing, and gives you switches for the camera and microphone right on the robot. You can also wipe the data it has stored. DJI calls the feature a new industry standard for home robots, which feels like a stretch, but I’ll take an overconfident privacy claim over no privacy controls at all. Local Data Mode arrives in Q4, with the older Romo models getting it later.
Americans get nothing. US restrictions have already kept DJI’s recent products out, and the FCC’s ban on foreign-made robot vacuums closes the door on ROMO 2 before it opens.
Nothing else at IFA carries the weight the G1 does, and I say that with a knot in my stomach.
Unitree designed its own quasi-direct-drive actuators instead of licensing harmonic drives, which is why the G1 undercuts every Western humanoid on cost while shipping in volume no Western rival approaches. NVIDIA then picked Unitree’s H2 Plus chassis as the hardware for its Isaac GR00T reference humanoid, with Stanford, ETH Zurich, Ai2, and UC San Diego signed as launch users, meaning the development stack that academic robotics is standardizing on now runs on hardware the US government placed on its Covered List in July and the Pentagon flagged as military-linked in June.
The 3 to 5 kg payload per arm is enough for lab work and light logistics, but not much beyond that. Unitree’s sales figures make the G1’s audience pretty obvious too. Its IPO prospectus says universities, research institutions, and individual developers made up 74% of humanoid sales in 2025. That’s still a research crowd.
The G1’s security record is enough to make me pause. UniPwn let an attacker get root access over Bluetooth from about 30 meters away without pairing, then scan for other Unitree robots and infect them. Andreas Makris and Kevin Finisterre disclosed the flaw. Olivier Laflamme found two more in August 2026, and production G1s were still vulnerable to root access.
Then there’s what the G1 sends back. Alias Robotics says the robot, without notifying the owner, sends audio, video, GPS, and sensor data to servers in China during normal use. Unitree disputes the claim, but no independent audit has settled the matter.
I still call the G1 the most important robot at the show. Important and advisable are separate words.
Certification is a dull subject, and I’m about to make it interesting. Mornine, built by a subsidiary of the automaker Chery, cleared TÜV Rheinland EU CE certification for hardware and software during IFA, described as the first humanoid to pass both the safety and cybersecurity conformance requirements for European markets.
Every other Chinese humanoid in Berlin is asking European buyers to make a judgment call that no regulator has made for them. Mornine is the only one handing over a structured compliance file instead. For any organization that needs documentation before a purchase order clears, the Mornine is the humanoid I’d put in front of the procurement team, and I’d expect its rivals to catch up on paperwork within a year because the certification advantage is too visible to ignore.
A floor-washing robot won’t make anyone’s highlight reel. Fine by me. The TR1 came into the show off a Kickstarter run backed by more than 2,000 supporters and demonstrated its EvoMate AI agent live, and it belongs on this list because it does one unpleasant job that people currently do on their knees.
Robot dogs get the applause. Floor washers get bought again.
Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law requires Chinese organizations and citizens to support and cooperate with state intelligence work. The obligation doesn’t bend around a privacy policy, a European subsidiary, or the physical location of a server. Legal scholars argue over how far it reaches in practice, and that argument is worth following, but the obligation is a fixed feature of Chinese incorporation rather than something a contract can waive.
China’s Cybersecurity Law got new rules in January 2026 that cover technical support for AI system operators. The Data Security Law adds another requirement. Companies have 48 hours to report newly discovered security flaws to Chinese authorities, which can put that report ahead of a patch or customer warning.
Now apply that to a robot with LiDAR, depth cameras, microphones, and centimeter-level positioning. A humanoid working a factory floor for a few weeks has produced an architectural scan of the building and a record of its production line without anyone asking. CE marks cover electrical safety and radio emissions. They say nothing about the legal question.
Europe has drawn no line here. The EU AI Act’s transparency obligations took effect in August, the Machinery Regulation becomes fully applicable in January 2027, and no EU-level action equivalent to the US Covered List exists for humanoid robotics. Buyers in Berlin this week are making the call themselves, ahead of any verdict.
There are still a few practical steps worth taking. I’d keep the robot off the same wireless network as anything important and cut its connection when it doesn’t need one. If you’re deploying it somewhere affected by export controls, I’d also get a lawyer to look over the setup first. None of that solves the bigger issue with Article 7.
Xiaomi’s CyberOne spent IFA giving finger hearts and thumbs-ups to passers-by, which tells me precisely nothing about whether it works. The interesting Xiaomi story is elsewhere. Its humanoids are being trialed on the company’s own car production line, where nut-tightening success reportedly climbed from around 90% to 98% inside four months. Come back when that number is audited by somebody who doesn’t work at Xiaomi.
I’d also hold off on any humanoid marketed for household chores. Every honest data point from Berlin points the same way. AgiBot’s own foundation model reached 78% task completion in the field after training on more than a million trajectories, well under the 95% industrial operators expect, and a Morgan Stanley buyer survey found only 23% of prospective customers satisfied with the humanoids they can buy now.
If I had to pick one robot from IFA to keep, I’d take Romo 2. A humanoid that writes calligraphy is more fun to watch, but I can see myself using the Romo every week. It cleans the floor, doesn’t make much noise, and DJI has at least tried to deal with the privacy problems that came with the original model.