Imagine this: You’re making cookies for a holiday gathering, and things are getting busy in the kitchen. She opened the oven door, put on oven mitts and grabbed a hot metal tray of warm snickerdoodles. You turn to put them on the counter and… eish, you forgot to adjust something so the tray rests. As you weigh your options, you notice that some of the trivets have started to come out of their storage space on the counter. They roll, alone, into place.
It looks magical, like something out of Beauty and the Beast, but it’s one possible vision for your kitchen of the future, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. With the help of cameras, various AI models and tiny little wheels, ordinary objects can find their way to where you want them to be, without you having to search for them.
It’s easy to imagine a robotic housekeeper, like Rosie from The Jetsons, but that’s not the only way robots and artificial intelligence can make life easier for you. at home or in the office. The same technology can be applied on a much smaller scale to things you already interact with regularly — your coffee mug, your stapler, your kitchen utensils and more.
“Instead of bringing more robots into our existing environments, what if the things already in our homes that we’re used to become smart and robotic?” Violet Han, who has a Ph.D. student at CMU and lead author of the paper on the study, the interview said.
Read more: I Saw It With My Own Eyes: Robots Are and Are Walking Among Us
Big, strong humanoid robots they’ve given us a lot to worry about: They’re heavy and powerful, they can cause damage if they don’t work properly. They approached that strange valley of creeping things where something seemed to be human. And it is very difficult to make someone work honestly. Human intelligence is an amazing evolutionary achievement, and we built our world with the assumption that those who walk it can do things like hold a doorknob. That’s a difficult skill to give a robot. If those robots become commonplace, they won’t be the only thing happening.
“I have a hard time imagining that you have these robot bullies, but at the same time, everything else stays the same,” said Alexandra Ion, an assistant professor at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, who leads the Interactive Structures Lab.
Adding AI and mobility to the things we use solves many of those problems. It allows automation to feel natural — you’re still using the same type of stapler, even if it has smaller wheels and seems to have a mind of its own. But there are new issues, like privacy and security, that need to be addressed before your coffee cup starts chasing you every time you yawn.
Violet Han uses a stapler attached to a platform controlled by AI models.
Things that move
If you’re going to have smart trivets that can ride you when you’re holding a hot tray of cookies, you need trivets that can move. In these tests, researchers have built wheeled platforms — cup-shaped, with a few wheels and motors and batteries, for example. Each is operated by a Bluetooth-enabled microcontroller. The latest consumer version of these things may be custom-built to be seamless, Han and Ion say, but this is proof that the technology is capable.
Things themselves are not equipped with artificial intelligence. While AI models can work with small pieces of hardware, like phones and watches, this is one AI system that controls the entire kitchen.
It is equipped with a camera that broadcasts photo frames to AI models that can process and identify what is happening at a given moment. They decide what a person does and see what might be involved in that job. Large language models have reasoning abilities that predict what will happen next. The knowledge base embedded in the system ensures that it knows some basic things about how people interact with things.
“If the cup is closer to me, it’s better for me if the handle is facing me,” for example, Han said.
While the idea of things coming to save you from trouble is wonderful (even if the problem itself is very small), the program can help in other ways. A key tray can shake your keys when you’re about to leave the house without them. If you want a stapler but it’s hidden behind something on your desk, AI can move it where you can see it. You can even use voice activation to ask your smart home to bring you a stapler.
When can you expect this in your house? The technology itself is “not that far off,” Ion said, but whether people will want the machines that make it possible is another matter. “If you’re okay with high-end cameras, that’s a lot faster to deploy,” he said, “but personally, I’m not okay with that.”
One privacy solution is less technical than political. Better regulations and policies can give consumers the comfort that their privacy will be protected, Ion said. Having models that can run entirely on local hardware, computers that are not connected to the Internet, can also help.
Watch this: How Humanoid Robots Can Gain Trust in 2026 | What is the Future
What kind of robots are you looking for?
With humanoid robotsIon said there’s a utopian vision of android butlers and a “dystopian version where your robot boss might turn evil for some reason.”
Whether it’s good or bad, the idea of humanoid robots in your home is getting closer to reality. At CES 2026, we saw example after example of machines with two arms, two legs-ish and the job of managing chores so you don’t have to. The results were mixed — some worked well, too LG washing bot folded clothes, but perhaps not with the speed and efficiency you’d hope for from the Jetsons’ Rosie.
Even if the robot is not humanoid, there are still concerns. In this case, should you put AI-controlled wheels on the knife? The researchers had a moving knife, but they designed it in such a way that the blade would always move away from the person.
“I think it’s an interesting argument and discussion to have,” Ion said. “Don’t we just want these kinds of things to work?”
The goal is to ensure that when robots do things in our homes, they work in a way that improves safety and helps us do what we want to do.
“Robots are becoming more and more capable of, for example, folding clothes, but…they have to fold the clothes the way we want them to,” Han said. “Clothes may be different. It is important that robots not only know but also understand what the user wants and how to best serve the users.”
Another way it might look? Your coffee cup signals that you are ready to go again and it starts to find its way to you.
