“Humanoids just aren't quite ready for the home yet. They're a huge safety hazard.” Aaed Musa · Embedded
Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026
Musa is explaining why his company builds quadrupedal home robots rather than humanoids, after a host asks whether he is making another military dog. He argues the 150-pound machines drawing all the attention still cannot do a household task like dishes or laundry, autonomously or not, and that something smaller has to come first.
Transcript
Yeah, I think it's, yeah, Isaac Sim, I think, is, especially because NVIDIA is like leading the semiconductor industry right now. Their software is very important.
So Mecca is making quadrupedal robots, and you're looking at reinforcement learning for behaviors. Is this going to be another one of those military dogs?
Definitely not. So we're doing the exact opposite of that. The goal is to make home robots in general. And we're starting with quadrupedal robots because we think that is the easiest form factor to integrate into homes right now. And so, yeah, like you mentioned, pretty much everyone who's making quadrupedal robots right now is targeting more industrial applications, more military applications. Spot, you know, from Buster Dynamics, that's an industrial robot. I think the only other company that's making quadrupedal robots in the US is Ghost Robotics, and they're a military, that's a military robot. And so, yeah, our goal is to make a friendly robot, something that is not going to be shift off to war, something that can be in your house and be sort of this all-in-one smart device for your home. Something that you can go on walks with, something that you can ask questions with, that can be a personal AI assistant, something that can help carry in your groceries, something that you can play with with your kids. We want something that feels real, something that is expressive, something that is emotive. And yeah, that's the goal. We want a cool home robot because we really don't have any robots out in the world that are doing that, that can be in the home right now. A lot of people are focusing on humanoids. And that's been the big buzz in the robotics world. I don't know. Humanoids just aren't quite ready for the home yet. They're a huge safety hazard. These things are like 150 plus pounds. And, you know, what people are promising that they're going to do is just realistically like another five to 10 years away. There's no humanoid right now today that can go into any home and do a task like wash your dishes or do your laundry non-autonomously or autonomously. There's no humanoid that can that can do that today. And so we think we think we'll eventually get to that point, but there has to be, there has to be something before that, something before the humanoid. And we think the quadruped is the perfect form factor for that.
I like the things you listed: carry your groceries, play with your kids. Those are two different weight classes, though. Carrying your groceries, it has to be massive enough to withstand my groceries. But playing with kids, I don't want it to be more than 20 pounds at that.
Yeah. Yeah. Great point. And so that's sort of the goal weight we're targeting as well, around like 20, 20-ish pounds. And yeah, with a 20-pound robot, you can carry some groceries. Maybe not like all of the, like, probably is not going to be able to carry like 20 pounds of groceries, like double its body weight or the same amount as its body weight. But you could probably carry like 10 pounds of groceries, especially if you're not doing it for super long, super, super long distances. You can carry some amount. But yeah, that's very important for us. Like safety, we don't want this thing to be something that can harm you if it falls over on you. It's low to the ground, which is good. But yeah, we want it to be low weight, something that you could pick up or a kid could pick up if you had to.
I spend quite a lot of my time trying to figure out how to make sure my robot will not fall and kill somebody. It's very distressing.