The robot in the living room is usually a vacuum. Chery, a car company, just put a 0.9-meter humanoid (人形机器人) there instead.
It will not fold your laundry. It is built to remind your father to take his pills and tell your daughter a story. Whether families let it stay is the real test.
On October 21, 2026, Chery Group's (奇瑞) Mojia Robot (墨甲机器人) unveiled Mobao (墨宝), its first consumer-grade home companion humanoid (人形机器人), at a launch event in Wuhu, Anhui, and opened global pre-orders the same day.
What Mobao is
Mobao stands 0.9 meters tall and weighs about 18 kilograms — light enough to lift with one hand. It has 22 degrees of freedom and can show more than 30 facial expressions, wrapped in flexible skin with a physical fuse for safety. On a single charge it runs roughly 1.5 to 2 hours.
Under the hood is Mojia's self-developed MoAgent embodied agent (具身智能体) architecture, paired with a VLM vision large model (大模型) and FaceID recognition. It understands 20-plus languages, keeps long-term memory, and stores family data with local encryption. The company says its fall detection can push an alert to family within about one second, and that it can run 16 tasks in parallel with interrupt response under 0.2 seconds.
The home script is specific: for elders, chat companionship, medicine reminders, fall alerts, and remote video calls; for children, stories, English practice, and homework help; for the whole family, breaking a spoken request like "tidy the living room" into steps and acting on it.
Why 0.9 meters
The height is a deliberate choice. Joint torque scales roughly with weight times lever arm, so an 18 kg, 0.9 m robot carries about one-eighth the static torque — and one-eighth the fall energy — of a 70 kg, 1.7 m one. Smaller also means cheaper and easier for a household to accept. Mojia is not alone here: 2026 has seen a cluster of sub-meter humanoids (人形机器人) from several Chinese makers.
The carmaker logic
Mojia leans hard on its parent. Chery's executive vice president and Mojia general manager Zhang Guibing (张贵兵) said the plan is to "use car-making cost logic to build robots that are mass-producible, deliverable, and profitable," carrying over automotive supply chains, manufacturing, and quality systems. The smart-driving perception and cabin interaction logic, the company says, were moved straight onto the robot.
Mojia is not starting from zero: it cites more than 3,000 units sold globally across 60-plus countries, with police-assistant robots deployed in 31 cities and medical-guide robots accurate to centimeter level. It plans around 300 experience stores worldwide, with rental, sale, and installment options.
The pre-order, and the missing price
Pre-orders opened at 99 yuan (≈ US$14), a deposit that expands to 2,999 yuan (≈ US$422) off at delivery, plus six months of extended warranty and priority-build VIP status. The window runs October 21 to November 13, 2026. The retail price, however, was not disclosed. One report puts it "possibly in the tens of thousands of yuan," with mass delivery expected by year-end across low, mid, and high configurations.
Beyond the living room
Mobao is only one front. Mojia also builds a four-legged robot dog, police-assistant robots, and medical-guide robots, and runs a robot-leasing plan to lower the entry barrier. The home companion is the consumer-facing edge of a company that has, until now, sold mostly to government and industry. Bringing a humanoid (人形机器人) into the living room is the riskiest move it has made — and the one that decides whether robotics leaves the factory floor.
The market behind it
Third-party data supports the small-form bet. According to Frost & Sullivan, the first half of 2026 saw about 36,000 humanoid (人形机器人) units sold worldwide; those under 100 cm numbered roughly 19,700, more than half, while full-size units above 160 cm were about 8,400, around a fifth.
According to Li An, chief scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), a home robot's hardest problem is not movement but earning the family's trust with cameras, microphones, and biometric data inside the home.
Honest limitations
The price is undisclosed, so "value" cannot be judged yet. A 1.5–2 hour battery limits continuous care, especially overnight. Fall detection, 16-task parallelism, and sub-0.2-second interrupt claims are vendor figures with no published third-party testing in real homes — carpets, pets, and running children are a different world from a stage. Privacy depends entirely on how local encryption and the MogaCloud data-return path are actually implemented. Humanoid (人形机器人) companions for the home remain early, and the "year-end delivery" line is a plan, not a shipment.
What readers can do now
- If you care for an elder, treat Mobao as a reminder and companion aid, not a safety device — keep a human check on medicine and falls.
- Wait for an in-store trial and a disclosed price before putting down the 99 yuan (≈ US$14) deposit.
- Before bringing one home, ask plainly where data is stored (local vs cloud) and how it can be deleted.