If you’ve ever wished that Pixar’s lonely little trash bot could roll straight out of the TV and into your living room, a small robotics startup is now about as close as you can reasonably get without calling Disney’s lawyers. Zeroth, a young AI robotics company that has spent the past few years in stealth, has turned WALL‑E into a real-world robot for China—and is bringing a WALL‑E-adjacent cousin, along with a doll-sized humanoid sidekick, to the US.​

At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Zeroth stepped onto the global stage with a lineup of five interactive robots, but the two that immediately stole the show are the W1 and the M1. The W1 is the one you notice first: a chunky, treaded bot that looks like WALL‑E after a few rounds with a generic-brand filter, right down to the tank-like tracks that let it trundle over grass, gravel, and uneven flooring. The official Disney-licensed WALL‑E robot—the one that really looks like the Pixar character—is only being sold in China for now, so the US instead gets this off-brand cousin for a cool $5,599.​

The “real” WALL‑E, built by Zeroth in partnership with Disney and Pixar, is positioned less as a Roomba replacement and more as an expressive, programmable character robot for families, classrooms, and theme parks. It is designed to be demonstratively emotional and interactive, the kind of robot that can lock “eyes” with a kid in a mall and sell the fantasy that this animated character has just stepped off the big screen. But that version is locked to China for now, making the W1 feel like the grey-import alternative: same basic body plan, far more utilitarian personality, a little uncanny when you realize it’s carrying your groceries instead of pressing a plant into its chest.​

On paper, the W1 is pitched as an all-terrain assistant for homes and “light commercial” environments, which is a fancy way of saying it’s a robot that can handle your backyard as well as your hallway. It uses lidar, RGB cameras, and a ring of sensors to map and navigate its environment, can follow you around, avoid obstacles, and haul up to 110 pounds of cargo—more than twice its own roughly 44‑pound body. You are not getting a speed demon here; its top speed is about 0.5 meters per second (around 1.1 mph), closer to a distracted toddler than a delivery robot, and it stands just over 22 inches tall, so it skews more helper-cart than sci‑fi butler.​

In terms of actual skills, Zeroth is underselling this thing as a very expensive, very cute pack mule. The W1 can ferry items around the house or office, play simple host by running games, follow a person like a robotic golden retriever, and snap photos with its 13‑megapixel camera. That feature list sounds a little thin for something priced like a high-end e‑bike, but the bet here is that software updates and developer tinkering will gradually make it more capable over time. Zeroth emphasizes that its robots share a common “technology DNA” stack—motion control, interaction models, and custom actuators—that is meant to make them feel more natural and more adaptable than the average novelty robot.​

If the W1 is the awkward WALL‑E cousin lumbering around your yard, the M1 is the tiny humanoid that lives on your desk and watches your life unfold. Roughly 15 inches tall, the M1 looks like someone crossbred a toy robot with a smart display and then infused it with just enough AI to make conversation. It starts at about $2,899 in the US and is explicitly pitched as a home companion—something to chat with, rely on for reminders, and maybe trust to keep an eye on older relatives when you’re not around.​

Under the hood, the M1 leans on Google’s Gemini AI model to handle natural conversations, which means it can do more than bark canned phrases or follow rigid scripted prompts. Zeroth says the robot can offer medication or schedule reminders, perform fall detection, and provide remote check-ins, essentially acting like a mobile, anthropomorphized safety sensor that roams your home instead of hiding in a smoke-detector-style puck on the ceiling. It can operate on a desktop or on the floor, is designed to fall and stand up again in both modes, runs for about two hours on a charge, and then automatically shuffles back to its dock to recharge.​

What Zeroth is really trying to sell with the M1 is a blend of emotional presence and utility. The company talks about it as a tool for supporting independent living for older adults, as a second set of hands for busy parents trying to juggle kids and work, and as a sandbox for creators and robotics enthusiasts to script their own behaviors and apps. Out of the box, the M1 ships with a set of built-in “skills,” but Zeroth is leaning heavily on future software updates and an app ecosystem to grow what this robot can actually do, echoing a familiar “buy the hardware now, hope the features show up later” pitch that consumer tech has been refining for the past decade.​

That broader roadmap comes into focus when you pull back from the WALL‑E headline and look at Zeroth’s full lineup. Alongside the M1 and W1 and the Disney-branded WALL‑E, the company is also working on A1, a quadruped robot for research and development, and Jupiter, a full-size humanoid intended for real-world tasks and teleoperation. CES 2026 is less about any one robot and more about Zeroth trying to plant a flag: it wants to be a multi-robot platform company, with a shared software and hardware stack scaling from “desk buddy” to “warehouse worker.”​

If all of this sounds like déjà vu, that’s because CES has turned into a kind of home-robot mirage in recent years: every January brings another batch of adorable bots promising to do your chores, keep you company, and usher in a Jetsons-style future. Most of them quietly fade away, either because the hardware is fragile, the AI isn’t up to the marketing, or consumers balk at paying premium laptop money for something that mostly spins in circles and plays trivia. Zeroth is trying to sidestep at least some of that skepticism by pitching concrete use cases—elder care, small-business support, education—rather than pure novelty, and by talking like a platform company rather than a one-off Kickstarter project.​

The price tags will still be the immediate gut check for most people. Spending nearly $2,900 on a desk-height humanoid and $5,600 on a WALL‑E-esque rover is a hard sell when smart speakers and tablets already handle a lot of the “assistant” role. But that gap between what a robot can physically do—carry real weight, move around your space, express itself with body language—and what a smart speaker can manage is exactly where startups like Zeroth see their opening. If you want a robot that doesn’t just answer questions but actually inhabits your home, reacts to you, and slowly gets better over time, you are firmly in early-adopter territory, and that is the crowd Zeroth is courting first.​

For now, all of this remains a preorder fantasy. Zeroth says both the M1 and W1 will be available to preorder in the US in the first quarter of 2026, with broader availability expected later in the year, while the Disney-branded WALL‑E stays exclusive to China. That leaves American buyers with a strangely fitting choice: the earnest, wide-eyed vision of a character robot that can only be imported in spirit through CES demos and YouTube clips—or the weird, workhorse cousin that will happily haul your stuff, host your game night, and remind you that the future of home robotics was always going to be a little less cinematic and a lot more practical.