{"id":2370,"date":"2026-07-16T18:05:53","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T18:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=2370"},"modified":"2026-07-16T18:05:53","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T18:05:53","slug":"sunday-robotics-says-its-robot-can-fold-clothes-it-has-never-seen-in-unfamiliar-homes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=2370","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Robotics says its robot can fold clothes it has never seen in unfamiliar homes"},"content":{"rendered":"<section>\n<p>In the race to bring autonomous robots into the home, Sunday Robotics says it has solved one of the field&#8217;s hardest problems: getting a robot to work in homes and handle objects it has never seen before.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=2368\">Blue Origin\u2019s new stock option plan comes with a catch<\/a><\/p>\n<p>On Thursday, the Bay Area-based startup unveiled ACT-2, a new AI model that powers Memo, its wheeled home robot. Sunday said that Memo folded laundry successfully more than 99% of the time when tested in unfamiliar homes, and on garments it had not been specifically trained to handle.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think 2026 will be when the timeline for autonomous home robots shrinks in a very drastic way because of this breakthrough,&#8221; Sunday Robotics CEO and cofounder Tony Zhao told Business Insider.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><iframe allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-root-margin=\"100% 0px\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/d7I1wj0Gkik?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"315\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" title=\"ACT-2 Preview: Generalizing Reliability\" width=\"560\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>For decades, home robot companies have struggled to build machines that are both reliable and adaptable. A robot may master a task in a controlled setting and falter in a new room or when handed an unfamiliar object, like folding a scarf when it&#8217;s been trained to fold jeans. Sunday says ACT-2 can carry what it learns in one environment into the next, potentially avoiding the costly process of retraining Memo for every home.<\/p>\n<p>Sunday raised $165 million earlier this year at a $1.15 billion valuation.<\/p>\n<h2>Sunday proposed a new robotics standard<\/h2>\n<p>Sunday also proposed a new industry standard for measuring progress in robotics. Called a &#8220;Solve,&#8221; it is meant to distinguish reliable capabilities from flashy demos that often omit how many attempts a robot needed or the conditions under which it was tested.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Each demo is a different robot, setting, and object, and it&#8217;s really hard to figure out if we&#8217;re progressing,&#8221; Zhao said. &#8220;It&#8217;s like apples-to-oranges comparisons.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Under Sunday&#8217;s framework, companies would clearly state what a robot can do, where it was tested, and how much extra training or human assistance it requires in each new setting.<\/p>\n<p>Sunday considers laundry folding Memo&#8217;s first Solve capability.<\/p>\n<p>To reach that level of reliability, Sunday trains ACT-2 in two stages. First, it learns basic physical skills from people performing everyday tasks while wearing sensor-equipped gloves that Sunday developed in-house. The gloves cost about $200 to make and mirror the shape and sensor layout of Memo&#8217;s hands, allowing human movements to be translated more directly into the robot&#8217;s movements.<\/p>\n<p>Then, Sunday&#8217;s in-house fleet of robots enables the model to learn from its mistakes. With its initial knowledge, the robot can learn new skills and improve its performance within minutes.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Memo&#8217;s performance in our office almost perfectly transfers to its performance in the wild,&#8221; Zhao said.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=2366\">An AI intimacy startup acquired an app to help couples stay together. Read the LinkedIn DM that sparked the deal.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>He added that the company has spent the last few months testing the model in employees&#8217; homes and Airbnbs to see how well it performed in unfamiliar environments.<\/p>\n<h2>Sunday competes with other home robots<\/h2>\n<p>Zhao, who left Stanford&#8217;s computer science Ph.D. program to build Sunday, and cofounder Cheng Chi started the company with a small team in a Silicon Valley hacker house in 2024. They chose to focus on the home because, unlike a factory, it is messy and unpredictable. Building a robot that can handle that, Zhao said, is the clearest path to physical artificial general intelligence, a term for AI capable of performing a broad range of real-world tasks as well as or better than humans.<\/p>\n<p>Sunday has since grown to more than 100 employees. Conviction&#8217;s Sarah Guo, who wrote the company&#8217;s first check, previously told Business Insider that she backed the founders because they were &#8220;completely cracked researchers&#8221; with &#8220;a real commitment to building products that got deployed and an Elon-style religion on delivering a mass-consumer product.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Sunday&#8217;s advance comes as several companies prepare to put robots in homes. Y Combinator-backed Weave Robotics plans to begin shipping Isaac 1, a $7,999 wheeled robot that folds laundry, in California this fall. 1X aims to start delivering its $20,000 NEO humanoid around the same time, while Tesla is working toward bringing Optimus into homes.<\/p>\n<p>Sunday plans to place Memo in homes through a beta program this fall. Zhao declined to say how many homes would participate.<\/p>\n<p>Memo will operate autonomously in homes, Zhao said, with a remote operator stepping in only when customers need help, similar to the remote assistance used by Waymo&#8217;s self-driving cars. Unlike many robotics companies, Sunday does not plan to use those interventions to collect training data from customers&#8217; homes.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Being fully autonomous is the best way to build trust,&#8221; Zhao said. &#8220;We are not trying to creep in a teleoperator into your home to collect your data so that we can get our model to be better.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Sunday previously demonstrated an earlier model, ACT-1, clearing a dinner table, loading a dishwasher, and pulling a shot of espresso. The company wants ACT-2 to eventually make those capabilities more reliable, starting with laundry. It is learning to vacuum, organize toys, fasten zippers, and make coffee.<\/p>\n<p>Those tasks, Sunday said, are not yet reliable enough.<\/p>\n<p><em>Have a tip? Contact Rya Jetha via email at <\/em><em><u>rjetha@businessinsider.com<\/u><\/em><em> or Signal at rjetha.07. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; <\/em><em>here&#8217;s our <u>guide<\/u><\/em><em> to sharing information securely.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=2364\">AT&amp;T built an AI system to prevent network outages. It reduced customer downtime by more than 12 million hours.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sunday Robotics, a $1.15 billion startup, will place Memo robots in homes through a beta program this fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Sunday Robotics says its robot can fold clothes it has never seen in unfamiliar homes - American home journals<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=2370\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sunday Robotics says its robot can fold clothes it has never seen in unfamiliar homes - 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