If you look closely at it, each movement is deliberate. There’s something unnatural about its motion, but it moves with precision and efficiency. The robot tilts its torso, extends an arm, and with a delicate pinch of two fingers, plucks a cherry by its stem. It rotates slightly, plates the fruit beside a slice of perfectly browned toast, and reaches for the milk. No flinching, no fumbling.

“Add some cherries, too,” says a calm voiceover in American English. “Such thin stems won’t trouble me. Just two fingers are enough to grip it firmly.”

This is Atom, the humanoid robot from the Chinese robotics firm Dobot. Standing five feet (1.52 meters) tall and weighing 136 pounds (62 kilograms), Atom is the latest player in a fast-moving race to develop bipedal, autonomous machines that can function in the real world — not just inside factories or labs, but in our kitchens, living rooms, and schools.

Robots in our kitchen

The new video which highlights the robot has all the sleek production value of a tech advertisement. In one sense, it is a tech advertisement. But it also shows the remarkable progress that consumer robots have made in a short amount of time thanks to AI.

The robot doesn’t just cook — it adapts. It manipulates fragile fruit and pours liquids with a level of precision that used to belong strictly to industrial machines. It explains what it does as it presents a nutritious, elaborate breakfast.

Atom features 28 degrees of freedom, allowing its limbs to move with fluidity. The “28 degrees of freedom” refers to how many independent ways a robot can move its articulations. It shoulder can move move up/down, forward/backward, and rotate (3 degrees of freedom per shoulder). Its wrist can rotate and flex, and so on.

Atom can operate with a positioning accuracy of 0.05 millimeters — an ability that enables it to do everything from soldering electronic components to placing lettuce on a breakfast plate.

It also uses straight-legged walking (with a straight knee). This looks strange but cuts energy use by 42%. It’s not flashy, but it’s built for endurance and efficiency.

Powering Atom is an AI system called Robot Operator Model-1, or ROM-1. Dobot says it provides the robot with adaptive intelligence — enough to learn its environment and tailor its responses. Atom is equipped with edge computing capabilities clocking in at 1,500 trillion operations per second (TOPS). That’s just behind Nvidia’s latest high-performance graphics cards. In short, it’s a robot with a gaming PC’s specs — but much steadier hands.

Will such robots become widespread?

Of course, the video makes the robot look very well. But the kitchen has been pre-arranged especially for this video. Will the robot navigate the messy, unpredictable, real-life kitchens with equal grace? That’s less clear.

Yet, Dobot already taking preorders for Atom. The robot is priced at $27,500 and mass production is expected to begin in mid-2025. That price tag might seem steep, but it’s a far cry from the six-figure sums humanoid robots used to command just a few years ago. It’s even cheaper than some luxury kitchen models, and prices for robots keep going down.

Also, Dobot is far from the only company working on something like this.

Adrian Stoch, chief automation officer at logistics giant GXO, said in a recent Wall Street Journal interview that humanoids like Digit — another bipedal robot made by Agility Robotics — could soon be working full shifts.

“Humanoid robots are the first category of robots that can be doing completely different tasks based on the needs of the business or the time of the shift,” he said. “In the future, we could have Digit unloading a trailer in the morning, picking goods in the afternoon, and loading trucks in the evening.”

Midea Group — a Chinese home appliance giant — unveiled a humanoid prototype capable of driving screws, opening bottle caps, and even dancing. Meanwhile, the Shenzhen-based startup Unitree is already mass-producing a $16,000 humanoid robot, the G1; and in Japan, a country with historically higher acceptance of technology, robot waiters and even care workers are becoming increasingly common.

Could we see a robot like Atom in our own homes soon? The short answer is, as always, maybe. Today, it’s a novelty in a showroom video and its $27,500 price tag is still hefty. But as companies race to bring costs down and capabilities up, the gap between science fiction and domestic reality is narrowing. Whether Atom becomes a kitchen staple or a stepping stone, it could signal a future where machines don’t just work for us — they live with us.