LG Electronics is turning its Zero Labor Home vision into a tangible reality at CES 2026. At the event, they unveil LG CLOiD™, an AI-powered home robot designed to take over time-consuming chores. It coordinates seamlessly with connected appliances. By combining robotics, smart home integration, and “Physical AI,” LG is making a strong play for the next era of fully automated home living.
LG CLOiD and the Zero Labor Home
LG CLOiD™ is an AI-enabled home robot built to perform and orchestrate everyday tasks like cooking, laundry, and household tidying. It works across LG’s connected appliance ecosystem. Demonstrated publicly for the first time at CES 2026, it builds on LG’s Self-Driving AI Home Hub LG Q9, and the ThinQ™ platform, effectively reducing both time and physical effort required for daily chores.
At CES 2026 in LAS VEGAS, LG CLOiD will be shown in real-world home scenarios. This includes retrieving milk from a refrigerator and putting a croissant in the oven for breakfast. It also starts laundry, then folds and stacks clothes after drying. These demonstrations are meant to show how the robot reads household routines, understands context, and controls appliances with precision rather than just executing pre-set scripts.
Physical AI and robotics design
Hardware-wise, LG CLOiD has a head unit, a torso with two articulated arms, and a wheeled base with autonomous navigation. This allows it to move safely around living spaces. The torso can tilt to adjust its height, allowing the robot to reach from knee level and above. This capability is essential for handling everyday objects in kitchens, laundry rooms, and living areas.
Each arm offers seven degrees of freedom. It includes shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints capable of forward, backward, rotational, and lateral motion. Each hand has five independently actuated fingers for precise manipulation. The wheeled base uses autonomous driving technology derived from LG’s robot vacuums and LG Q9, chosen for stability, safety, and cost-efficiency. It has a low center of gravity that reduces tipping risks if a child or pet bumps into it.
Vision-based Physical AI: VLM and VLA
At the core of LG CLOiD is LG’s “Physical AI,” driven by a Vision Language Model (VLM) and Vision Language Action (VLA) system. It turns what the robot sees and hears into actions in the physical world. VLM converts images and video into structured, language-style understanding. Meanwhile, VLA translates that multimodal understanding into context-aware tasks like opening doors, operating appliances, or moving objects.
These models have been trained on tens of thousands of hours of household task data. This enables LG CLOiD to recognize different appliances, interpret user intent, and execute appropriate actions. It avoids relying on simple, pre-programmed routines. The robot’s head works as a mobile AI home hub. It includes a chipset “brain,” display, speaker, cameras, sensors, and voice-based generative AI. This setup lets it communicate with people using natural speech and expressive visual feedback. It also learns individuals’ living patterns.
ThinQ integration and AXIUM actuators
LG CLOiD’s capabilities expand through integration with LG’s ThinQ™ AI Home Platform and ThinQ ON hub, giving it control over a broad range of LG smart appliances and services. This tight connectivity lets the robot orchestrate household routines as a conductor rather than just a stand-alone gadget. It manages devices from kitchen to laundry to entertainment.
Alongside the robot, LG is debuting LG Actuator AXIUM™, a new line of robotic actuators that serve as the joints in service robots. Drawing on its component expertise built in the home appliance business, LG aims to deliver actuators with a lightweight, compact design. They offer high efficiency and high torque. The actuators use modular engineering to support multi-variety production for advanced robots that may require dozens of actuator types.
Roadmap to the AI Home
LG plans to keep developing home robots with practical forms and functions for housework, while also “robotizing” traditional appliances. This includes expanding categories like “Appliance Robots,” such as robot vacuums, and “Robotized Appliances,” like refrigerators whose doors open automatically as a person approaches.
Steve Baek, president of the LG Home Appliance Solution Company, said, “The LG CLOiD home robot is designed to naturally engage with and understand the humans it serves, providing an optimized level of household help”. He added that LG “will continue our relentless efforts to achieve our Zero Labor Home vision, making housework a thing of the past so that customers can spend more time on the things that really matter.”
Visitors to CES 2026 from January 6–9, 2026, can experience LG CLOiD and the Zero Labor Home scenarios at LG’s booth #15004 in the Las Vegas Convention Center. For the broader smart home market, LG’s push into Physical AI, robotics hardware, and integrated platforms positions the company as a key contender in the race to define everyday life in the AI-driven home.
