Acceptance Issues and Key Challenges for Home Humanoid Robots

Why might households hesitate to bring a humanoid robot home? This exploratory, pre-adoption study identifies four acceptance issues for home humanoid robots (form, safety, trust and privacy) and the key technical and governance challenges they imply. Data and method. Using one product case, 1X NEO, the study derives the issues from 16 expert evaluation texts (Feb 2025–Jul 2026) and 827 online comments from Hacker News and Reddit (Feb 2024–May 2026). It then reads them through the domestication model (Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1992) and published household studies of existing devices such as robot vacuums, smart speakers and shared computers. Argument. Each issue marks a point where the judgments and adjustments households already make with existing devices stop working for a humanoid. Examples are giving a device a place and role, controlling access by placement, widening what is entrusted through use, and covering or switching a device off. Responses should therefore move from improving specifications to enabling household judgment and adjustment. In the deck this means four shifts: from physical form to temporal form, from physical safety to perceived safety, from single-task reliability to calibrated trust and trust repair, and from owner consent to bystander privacy. Challenges. The deck sets out representative technical challenges with reported levels and first-stage targets, covering response latency, stopping time, uncertainty-aware help-seeking and device security. It then links these to design, validation and governance measures that support household judgment. Scope. Data were collected before customer deliveries. Figures from experimental settings are reference points, not product measurements. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent ETRI.