These cute little AI pets want to be your robot companions. CES 2026 is already shaping up to be an interesting year for robots. But while some companies are chasing humanoids that can help you do stuff, there are also a surprising number of robots whose main job is to be cute and keep you company. Japanese startup Ludens AI is showing off two extremely adorable robot companions at CES. Cocomo is an autonomous robot pet that can follow you around the house and respond to voice and touch. It has a fuzzy, egg-shaped body, but the version we saw at CES was wearing an orange suit with ears that made it look a bit like a teddy bear. It was moving around on a wheeled base, but it also has tiny legs if you prefer to carry it around and hold it.

In recent years we've seen a ton of robots designed to fill a wide range of human needs, from factory-line production to service needs at hospitals. Disney has delved into robot technology to enhance the visitor experience at its theme parks. Josh D'Amaro, Disney Parks chairman of experiences and products, attended South by Southwest in Austin to showcase several robots that roam the parks for the delight of visitors. D'Amaro pulled back the curtain on ways Disney uses robots to enhance environments designed and built for "happiness." In his presentation, Creating Happiness: The Art & Science of Disney Parks Storytelling, D'Amaro showed off robots from the tiny to the huge, going from Tinkerbell to a roller-skating kid robot.

NASA researchers are developing origami-inspired robots that could soon be used to explore extreme alien environments. The Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robots, or Puffers, have a collapsible design and are small enough to hitch a ride on another craft, such as a Mars rover or Europa lander. According to the space agency, these adorable robots will be able to reach areas that the larger vehicles cannot, allowing them to investigate caves and lava tubes on Mars, or the icy'chaos terrains' of Europa. NASA researchers are developing origami-inspired robots that could soon be used to explore extreme alien environments. Not only are these bots similar in size to a smartphone when folded, they also have a comparable weight and volume.

I love my garden at home, but the one thing I can't stand: weeds. No matter what I do, the little buggers pop up between all of our plants and vegetables. If I take off for just one weekend, the garden is packed with them. Well, a new startup may just have the answer in the form of a tiny, adorable robot. It's called the Tertill, and its premise is amazingly simple: it's a small, waterproof, solar-powered robot that hangs out in your garden and trims any weeds that it finds as soon as they pop up.

Bounding around like an excitable puppy, this amazing four legged robot can open doors and even climb over fences by itself. The Ghost Minitaur can be programmed with a series of different gaits from bounding, trotting, and walking to something called pronking – the kind of four-legged spring seen in gazelles. The miniature robot, which measures just 1.3 feet long (40cm) – about the same as a small dog – has a top speed when running of just 4.5 mph. The team behind the Minitaur are currently selling them for around 10,000 a go but they hope to reduce the price as demand increases. The developers have used a series of direct drive electric motors and some custom electronics to allow the robot to move in a range of different ways.

If you ask, Alexa can tell you a joke and Siri will recite a haiku. Jibo will do that, and more: the new home robot can sense when you're feeling down and try to make you smile. Cynthia Breazeal, a social robotics expert at MIT, designed the 749 bot to exhibit something approaching empathy. It isn't the first--Pepper, a humanoid robot from Softbank, does the same thing and arrives in the US later this year. But Pepper started in customer service and was adapted to home use. The oversized head is a bit too big for its body, like a puppy.

Some would-be users might chafe at the thought of a machine keeping tabs on them. Hackers have been able to break into some Internet-connected devices in the past, and both Google Home and Amazon Echo have drawn criticism for collecting huge amounts of data about their users. Intelligent machines are playing an increasingly central role in people's lives, and users will have to decide whether the advantages of "always-on" technology outweigh the potential drawbacks. Asus is selling Zenbo for 599. While that's a lot more than, say, the Amazon Echo, it's cheaper than many other home'bots, like the 995 Personal Robot from tech company Robot Base.