Yogi

Cartwheel Robotics

United States

Product Page

Yogi was Cartwheel Robotics' answer to a specific complaint, and the founder told the story himself. At Boston Dynamics, where he worked on Atlas, his children found the robots frightening; at Disney, they smiled at Baby Groot and wanted to hug it. That contrast became the product brief: a small friendly humanoid meant to bring joy, warmth and a little everyday magic into living spaces, expressive, emotionally intelligent and with a personality of its own, something felt rather than merely a technical product. So Yogi has a toddler-like body with rounded lines, a large head and a slightly chubby build, which the company says is exactly what makes it read as friendly and approachable, with soft skin to match, and its published jobs are sweeping, housework and keeping children company. It was built at a hundred and fifty centimetres and forty-seven kilograms with thirty-six degrees of freedom, a fifteen kilogram dual-arm payload and three hours of runtime at a listed 603,500 CNY, though the manufacturer's site is gone and none of that can be rechecked. Underneath sat a motion language model, shown only months before the end, meant to let the robot understand speech the way a person does and convey emotion and intent through movement. The commercial reality was seven people and about three million dollars, one disclosed US$150,000 strategic investment from New Wave, and then a failure to raise: the company closed in 2026 as the first humanoid robot firm to fold that year. The founder's farewell line is the summary: in hardware, capital is like oxygen, and no money is better than the wrong money.