Samsung’s little yellow robot never really stood a chance — at least not the way it was sold to people. For years, Ballie was pitched as a kind of rolling BB-8 for your living room, an AI sidekick that could follow you around, talk to your appliances, watch your pets, and beam Netflix onto the wall. Now, after yet another no‑show at CES 2026 and some carefully worded corporate statements, it looks less like the future of the smart home and more like the latest entry in Samsung’s long list of “cool but never shipped” gadgets.​

Ballie’s story starts back at CES 2020, where Samsung rolled it onstage as a friendly yellow sphere with “eyes” and just enough personality to steal the keynote. It trundled along behind an executive, reacted to voice commands, and was framed as a vision of what AI in the home could feel like once it escaped the smart speaker and got wheels. Compared to the usual parade of TVs and refrigerators, Ballie looked genuinely new — a sort of cross between a Roomba and a Pixar character, promising to be proactive instead of just reactive.​

Then it disappeared. For a couple of years, Ballie was more concept reel than product, a recurring cameo in Samsung’s CES shows that never got a price, a ship date, or a real explanation. When it came back at CES 2024, it was bigger, more spherical, and suddenly a lot more ambitious. Samsung showed Ballie roaming around a house, controlling smart lights, checking on pets via camera, answering the door, and, crucially, firing up its built‑in projector to turn floors and walls into displays for workouts, movies, and work calls. It wasn’t just a rolling toy anymore; it was marketed as “more than just a home robot, it’s your new smart buddy” with vision AI and tight smart‑home integration.​

By CES 2025, Ballie seemed closer than ever to reality. Samsung talked about a retail launch, opened preregistrations in the US, and was telling the press that a consumer release was coming. Last year, the company was still insisting that Ballie hadn’t been canceled after missing a summer 2025 window, just “refined and enhanced” to deliver a better experience. On paper, this was the classic slow‑burn hardware story: early concept, years of iteration, then finally a shipping product that justifies the hype.​

That is not how it played out. Ballie never actually arrived in stores, and this year at CES 2026, Samsung quietly left it off the show floor entirely. Instead, the company sent a statement describing Ballie as an “active innovation platform” that “continues to inform how Samsung designs spatially aware, context-driven experiences” for things like ambient AI and privacy‑by‑design. Translation: Ballie is not something you’ll be able to buy anytime soon, but the tech might live on inside other Samsung products. Bloomberg reported that the rolling robot has been indefinitely shelved after repeated delays, which lines up uncomfortably well with its ghosting at CES.​

If this feels familiar, that’s because Samsung has been here before. In 2018, it announced the Galaxy Home, a high‑end, Bixby‑powered smart speaker that got stage time, press releases, and promises of more details “soon,” before quietly fading into nothing. Ballie now looks like it belongs to that same class of devices: future‑facing, heavily marketed, and ultimately too weird or risky to ship at scale. For a company that actually does ship millions of TVs, phones, and washing machines, it underscores a tension between using CES as a stage for imagination and turning those ideas into products that survive the real world.​

The timing also makes Ballie’s absence sting more. CES 2026 is full of AI‑powered robots trying to claim the “home assistant” slot that Ballie spent years warming up. LG’s new CLOiD robot, for instance, is basically the anti‑Ballie: a wheeled base topped with a humanoid torso and two articulated arms, designed to fold laundry, load the dishwasher, organize the fridge, and run errands around the house through LG’s ThinQ smart home platform. Where Ballie leaned into cuteness and projection tricks, CLOiD leans into doing actual chores — the kind of tasks that are harder, less glamorous, but easier to explain to a skeptical buyer.​

Zoom out, and Ballie’s slow fade says a lot about where home robots are right now. Analysts tracking personal and household robotics point to three huge problems: cost, reliability, and the “why would I buy this?” factor. Multifunctional robots that try to be everything — security camera, pet sitter, projector, smart hub — tend to be expensive, complicated, and hard to justify when single‑purpose devices already do most of those jobs reasonably well. Even Roomba‑style vacuum robots, which solve a clear problem, have had to fight churn and price sensitivity; if those are a tough sell, a thousand‑dollar rolling projector is an even tougher one.​

Then there’s the privacy angle. To work as advertised, Ballie needed cameras, microphones, and enough on‑device intelligence to map your house, watch your pets, and learn your routines. Regulators are already scrutinizing AI devices that collect home data, and research on the personal robotics market notes that data privacy and cybersecurity compliance can significantly raise R&D costs and slow down launches. For a company like Samsung, which sells into almost every market on earth, shipping a mobile, camera‑equipped robot into people’s bedrooms is not just a design problem — it’s a legal and reputational risk.​

The other uncomfortable truth is that real homes are chaos. CES demos are staged in clean, open showrooms where robots glide across pristine floors and never get stuck under a couch. Actual apartments have rugs, toys, cables, pets, random clutter, and family members who do not always cooperate with precise demos. Industry reports bluntly point out that there is still a “performance gap” between controlled demos and how general‑purpose home robots behave in unstructured environments, and that gap kills confidence. If a robot falls apart when it hits Lego on the floor, your magical AI companion quickly becomes an expensive headache.​

That doesn’t mean the tech behind Ballie is wasted. Samsung’s own statement makes it clear the company still sees value in the underlying ideas: spatial awareness, context‑aware automation, and the notion that your devices should quietly adapt to you instead of barking commands back and forth. Some of that thinking is already visible in “ambient AI” features that predict what you want your TV, lights, or appliances to do based on time, presence, and patterns, rather than relying entirely on manual control. It’s easy to imagine Ballie’s vision algorithms or mapping tech quietly showing up inside cameras, TVs, or smart hubs that never roll an inch.​

For people who were genuinely excited to preorder Ballie, though, this is still a letdown. Samsung’s own global page was, until recently, inviting users to “pre-register now and be the first to meet Samsung Ballie,” with bright lifestyle shots and the promise of an AI companion for the home. The teaser site reportedly still says “see you soon,” even as news outlets report the robot has been sidelined indefinitely. If nothing changes, Ballie will go down as yet another CES legend — the kind of product people remember seeing in highlight reels but never in a store.​

In a weird way, that might be Ballie’s most honest legacy. Home robots are clearly coming; LG’s CLOiD and a wave of other household bots show that big companies still believe in the category. But Ballie’s quiet exit is a reminder that making robots cute and cinematic is the easy part. Making them affordable, trustworthy, and useful enough that someone will live with one — that’s the hard bit, and for now, it’s where even a company as big as Samsung is still rolling in circles.​