Sunday Bets on Cheaper Home Robots

This split is really a bet on what breaks first, robot capability or consumer patience. Sunday is betting households will buy a cheaper machine that does one annoying job well, like picking up toys or laundry, before they buy a $20K humanoid that can in theory do everything but still moves slowly and fails more often in messy homes. That makes form factor less about aesthetics and more about price, reliability, and how much behavior change a family will accept.

• The non humanoid camp is simplifying the hardware on purpose. Sunday uses a wheeled base, telescoping spine, and simple grippers, and The Bot Company uses a treaded mobile base, both aimed below $10K and centered on narrow, frequent chores instead of full housekeeping.
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• The humanoid camp argues homes were built for human bodies, so stairs, cabinets, doors, and countertops favor two arms and two legs. 1X is testing that thesis with NEO at about $20K or $499 per month, but current task speeds still look much closer to demo quality than full time domestic labor.
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• Both camps are really competing on data collection. Humanoid companies often gather data through teleoperation in factories and other controlled settings, while Sunday is using glove based human demonstrations across 500 plus households and 1,000 plus gloves to build training data before putting robots into homes.
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The likely path forward is convergence around the middle. Humanoids will keep improving in industrial settings where teleoperation and higher prices are acceptable, while non humanoids will try to win the first real home robot market with cheaper, narrower products. The companies that survive will be the ones that turn early deployments into a fast learning loop, then expand from one chore into many.