Over the past year, we have heard several rumors about Apple’s upcoming tabletop robot. While 2025 seems to be the year the company will finally bet on smart home devices, a team of robotics researchers at Apple leaked one of its most ambitious future products.
In a blog post spotted by MacRumors, Apple shows ELEGNT in action, an “expressive and functional movement design for the non-anthropomorphic robot.” Here’s a summary of the company’s tabletop robot:
Nonverbal behaviors such as posture, gestures, and gaze are essential for conveying internal states, both consciously and unconsciously, in human interaction. For robots to interact more naturally with humans, robot movement design should likewise integrate expressive qualities—such as intention, attention, and emotions—alongside traditional functional considerations like task fulfillment, spatial constraints, and time efficiency. In this paper, we present the design and prototyping of a lamp-like robot that explores the interplay between functional and expressive objectives in movement design. Using a research-through-design methodology, we document the hardware design process, define expressive movement primitives, and outline a set of interaction scenario storyboards. We propose a framework that incorporates both functional and expressive utilities during movement generation, and implement the robot behavior sequences in different function- and social- oriented tasks. Through a user study comparing expression-driven versus function-driven movements across six task scenarios, our findings indicate that expression-driven movements significantly enhance user engagement and perceived robot qualities. This effect is especially pronounced in social-oriented tasks.
There’s even a video highlighting how it might interact with the environment around it, showing some clever ideas such as lighting up a book, a table, or a wall and responding to human input.
Apple’s rumored tabletop robot is expected to launch between 2026 and 2027. Previously, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reported the device will feature a large, iPad-like display mounted on a “thin robotic arm.” It tilts and rotates a full 360º, serving as a “smart home command center,” a hub for FaceTime calls, and a home security monitoring tool.
With a focus on Apple Intelligence and Siri, this device would recognize different voices in the house and perform a Center Stage-like feature to face users in the room whenever they speak to it.
While Apple has been working on robotic home devices for some time now, Gurman says Apple has put Kevin Lynch, the company’s VP of technology, in charge of this project. Several hundred people are reportedly working on the device.
Apple aims at the high-end market, as this iPad-like robotic home device would cost around $1,000. At this moment, the first Apple home robot runs a modified version of iPadOS, but other details are unclear. In April of last year, Gurman said the robotic smart display was reportedly much further along in development than the mobile robot the company has been working on. However, these products have often been added and removed from the company’s roadmap.
BGR will let you know once we learn more about these future smart home products.
