Each environment state has a corresponding array and a scene graph representation.

Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? This summer, I found myself in the strange position of watching a humanoid robot try to load laundry. It squatted beside a washer-dryer unit, reached with one hand into a laundry basket that it was holding with the other, and put some clothes into the drum. But twice in a row, it dropped a piece of clothing and couldn't pick it back up. An engineer with a litter-picker grabbed the fallen cloth and sheepishly moved it behind the machine, out of my line of sight.

Reconstructing past events requires reasoning across long time horizons.

Each environment state has a corresponding array and a scene graph representation.

A dozen or so young men and women, eyes obscured by VR headsets, shuffle around a faux kitchen inside a tech company's Silicon Valley headquarters. Their arms are bent at the elbows, palms facing down. One pilot stops to pick up a bottle of hot sauce from a counter, hinging at the waist, making sure to keep her hands in view of the camera on her headset at all times. Meters away, two humanoid robots, with bulbous joints and expressionless plastic domes for faces, stand at a desk. In front of each is a crumpled towel; to its right, a basket. More often than not, the towel catches on the edge of the basket and the robot freezes. Then an engineer steps in and returns the towel to a crumpled heap, and the sequence begins again. This was the scene inside the Silicon Valley headquarters of Figure AI on an August morning this year. The three-year-old startup was in a sprint ahead of the October announcement of its next robot, the Figure 03, which was undergoing top-secret training when TIME visited.

Modern laundry detergents work better in cold water. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. You may wash your clothes with hot water--many people do. That could be a mistake. Modern washing machines, and modern laundry detergent, are designed to work well at cold temperatures.

From making tea to cleaning the floors, everyday life often feels like one huge chore. But the opportunity to offload such menial tasks to your own personal robot helper may arrive sooner than you think. In a promo clip, the advanced humanoid boils the kettle, vacuums floors, carries groceries, cleans windows and puts up a picture frame. At the end of the video, it takes a well-earned sit in the longue – while its blissfully-happy owners drink wine in the next room. Although it is currently a prototype, the creation could be autonomously completing chores in customers' homes by the end of the decade.

If you look at your Roomba with disgust, thinking about what a far cry it is from the Jetsons' Rosey the Robot, help is on the way. Bloomberg reported on Friday that Meta plans to leverage its advances in AI and augmented reality to build a platform for futuristic humanoid robots that can help with household chores like folding laundry. Meta is reportedly creating a new team within its Reality Labs hardware division, which handles Quest VR headsets and the long-term Orion AR glasses project. Although it will build robot hardware during development, Meta's long-term goal is more like Android, where Google makes the software platform that almost all of the industry (outside of Apple) uses. Meta would make the underlying sensors, AI and software for other companies to put inside their hardware.

I'm convinced the robot revolution is finally here. I was at the world's largest electronics exhibition Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, where engineers have for decades claimed that commercially available humanoids were just around the corner. But this was the year that their predictions finally appeared to be close to reality. This was especially clear when I interacted with a robot that moved and danced with human-like fluidity--stepping one leg in front of the other and swaying naturally to maintain balance. Rounding a corner, I met another who could lift and stack boxes just like an Amazon worker.