Mecanix Unveils First Fully Autonomous Bipedal Robot for Home Care

Paris, France — Mecanix, a two-year-old robotics startup headquartered in Lyon, unveiled the AX-1 on Tuesday: the world's first commercially available bipedal robot engineered explicitly for unstructured home environments. Unlike competitors that rely on pre-mapped floor plans or external sensor arrays, the AX-1 builds its own 3D semantic map of any living space in under four minutes using an on-board fusion of LiDAR, ultrasonic tactile skin, and a neuromorphic visual cortex running entirely on-device.

The robot stands 1.65 meters tall, weighs 38 kilograms, and can climb stairs with a 35-centimeter rise without rail support — a feat previously limited to hydraulically actuated industrialhumanoids costing five times the AX-1's projected $28,000 retail price. Its knees use a proprietary vestibular-elastic actuator design: a spring-loaded series elastic actuator paired with a biological-inspired semicircular canal sensor array that gives the machine a sense of balance closer to human physiology than any prior commercial robot.

Mecanix CEO and co-founder Laure Marchand, a former CNRS biomechanics researcher, demonstrated the AX-1 retrieving a glass of water from a kitchen shelf, navigating over a sleeping dog, and descending a spiral staircase — all without human intervention or pre-programming. "The robot doesn't follow instructions," Marchand said. "It interprets intent within context. When I told it 'I'm thirsty,' it inferred the goal, assessed the environment, and chose the safest path to the kitchen."

The company plans to ship 500 units in Q1 2028 to a waitlist of eldercare facilities across France, Germany, and the Netherlands. A U.S. launch is targeted for late 2028, pending FCC certification of its 94 GHz millimeter-wave proximity sensors.

Key Specs — Mecanix AX-1:

• Height/Weight: 165 cm / 38 kg
• Max step height: 35 cm
• Runtime: 6 hours (adaptive power mode)
• Mapping time: < 4 minutes
• On-board AI: Neuromorphic vision, no cloud dependency
• Price: $28,000 (consumer tier)