Humanoid robots fold laundry and throw backflips on the IFA Berlin floor

The consumer-electronics hall in Berlin spent the first week of September full of bipeds. IFA 2026, which ran 4 to 8 September at Messe Berlin, put more humanoid robots on a trade-fair floor than the event has ever booked. Some folded laundry. Some posed for selfies. Some, wearing panda suits, threw backflips on a loop. The useful question was which of those machines had a job attached and which were there to draw a crowd past a stand.

LG's answer was a slogan, Zero Labor Home, and a robot called CLOiD. The company used the unit as the visible conductor of an "AI Orchestra" that tied together appliances, screens and other devices. The pitch is that a home robot becomes the hands for a software layer that already lives in fridges and washers. Pudu Robotics brought the PUDU D7, which picked up objects on request, took photographs from its own camera and formed a heart with its hands. Those are demonstration tricks. They are also the short list of motions a service robot needs in a shop or a lobby: grasp, pose, not fall over.

MagicLab Robotics dressed several humanoids as pandas and had them backflip. EngineAI, Unitree, Agibot, Deep Robotics, Galbot and a dozen other names filled IFA Next, the start-up and robotics zone, which the organiser said would host about 300 exhibitors. A "Robots on the Runway" show on 5 September put Primebot, Cozio, Dobot, Ollobot, Astrall Dynamics and AIMOGA on a catwalk. RoboCup ran student teams in the usual football and rescue events. Spectacle and procurement shared the same aisle, which is how IFA works.

The European industrial claim sat with NEURA Robotics, a German firm that in June closed a Series C of up to $1.4 billion at a $7 billion valuation, with Qualcomm, Amazon and Nvidia among the backers. At IFA it showed the 4NE1 humanoid and the MiPA mobile manipulator as products rather than prototypes. The company talks about a "Neuraverse" skill store, an app-store model for robot behaviours. Leif Lindner, chief executive of IFA Management, called NEURA a firm that is shaping the category. That is fair-speak. The fact underneath is that a European full-stack robotics company can now raise American-scale money and still choose Berlin as the place to show the hardware.

Humanoid robotics has been told as a U.S.-China race. Unitree and Agibot on the floor kept that race visible. NEURA's cheque and its home crowd are the counter-example. None of the machines on the carpet is ready to replace a night-shift nurse. Several are ready to be sold as lobby greeters, warehouse pilots or home showpieces for buyers who can stand a five-figure price and a handler. IFA is where those buyers walk.

The honest split at the show was between entertainment gait and task gait. A backflip burns energy and wins a camera. Folding a towel, docking a washer and climbing a stair without a reset are the motions that decide whether a unit leaves the hall as a product. CLOiD, 4NE1 and D7 were pointed at the second list. The pandas were pointed at the first. Both lists will be funded this year. Only one of them changes a labour roster.