The holidays are a popular time for technophiles and scrooges alike to circle back to a topic of regular speculation — what’s the latest on home robots?

Robotic mowers are awesome and floor cleaners get smarter each year. Still, one-function bots, from home tools to burger flippers, disappoint those who compare them to the intelligent and autonomous machines foretold in SciFi (although this one did not disappoint). Amazon Astro was probably the biggest headliner in the home robot market this year. Though it’s primarily marketed as a home security bot, its camera face does makes it a multitasker, however it’s TBD how well it all actually works.

Getting less conversation share, but making progress in their own right, are startups that are bringing the robotic arms that we associate with giant warehouses into our homes and small businesses. For example, we recently learned about UFactory in a contributing article from Kickstarter’s Laura Feinstein. The Shenzhen-based tech start-up is working to make robots more accessible to everyone and last year it “launched the most funded robot campaign in history.”

UFactory’s product range started with the uARM, a desktop robotic arm you can teach to complete simple tasks without code, and recently introduced the Lite 6, a lightweight arm for small and medium enterprises. Use cases for the Lite 6 range from helping engineers test touchscreens, to automating lab tasks for researchers, to simply making coffee.

Today, we’re also watching the launch of HUENIT, a modular robotic arm with an AI camera. Like UFactory, HUENIT is targeting everyday technophiles and makers who can find ways to leverage the dexterous robot arm in their daily lives.

The demo video shows the HUENIT 3D printing, laser engraving, and delicately suctioning and moving objects it recognizes one by one. The AI camera makes it “capable of a number of artificial intelligence technologies such as face recognition, image classification, object detection, line tracking, color recognition, human segmentation, and more,” explains maker Sangmin Lee. HUENIT can be programmed using block coding, python, Arduino C++, and G-code.

Maybe just don't program it to play Red Light Green light...

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