Apple may be interested in making both humanoid and non-humanoid consumer robots

Apple has developed a new framework called EMOTION, which helps robots learn mimic human expressions and hand gestures.

Apple is reportedly interested in making consumer robots. (Image Source: Microsoft Designer)

Apple is reportedly working on humanoid and non-humanoid robots that could eventually join the tech giant’s smart home ecosystem. The news comes from well-known Apple analyst Ming-Chi, who claims that the products “are still in early proof-of-concept stage.”

This means that the products will first be internally tested for quite some time before Apple finalizes anything. The iPhone maker recently posted a research paper on its website introducing a new framework to help these machines imitate human expressions. Dubbed EMOTION, Apple says it can help humanoid robots enhance their ability to engage in human-like non-verbal communication using things like facial expressions, gestures and body movements.

Apple is exploring both humanoid and non-humanoid robots for its future smart home ecosystem, and these products are still in the early proof-of-concept (POC) stage internally. While the industry debates the merits of humanoid vs. non-humanoid designs, supply chain checks…

— 郭明錤 (Ming-Chi Kuo) (@mingchikuo) February 12, 2025

According to Kuo, Apple might be more interested in seeing how “users build perception with robots rather than their physical appearance”, which means the company might primary focus would be on the hardware and software side of things.

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The tipster also hints that Apple using the term “non-anthropomorphic” in its research paper hints that the company might be interested in selling robots that do not look like humans. In the video below, Apple says it trying to develop humanoid robots that may be able to understand social contexts and respond with appropriate gestures.

The company claims it is taking an LLM-based approach to generative expressive motion sequences and used the Vision Pro headset to “collect demonstrations” to train the humanoid robot to “incorporate human feedbacks.” Citing “current progress and typical development cycles”, Kuo says Apple’s humanoid and non-humanoid robots could go into mass production in 2028. But since the project is reportedly in the early stages of development, it won’t be surprising if Apple scraps or delays it.