Sunday Robotics: Scaling the Home Robot Revolution with Co-Founders Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

The robotics industry is on the cusp of its own “GPT” moment, catalyzed by transformative research advances. Enter Memo, the first general-intelligence personal robot, focused on taking on your chores to give back your time. Sarah Guo sits down with Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, co-founders of Sunday Robotics, to discuss the state of AI robotics. Tony and Cheng speak to the challenges they faced while developing their technology, the innovative glove system employed to scale real-world data collection, and the impact of diffusion policy and imitation learning. Plus, they talk about their 2026 in-home beta program and why personal robots are only a handful of years away from mass deployment.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi Introduction

00:56 – State of AI Robotics

02:11 – Deploying a Robot Pre-AI

03:13 – Impact of Diffusion Policy

04:29 – Role of ACT and ALOHA

07:02 – Imitation Learning - Enter UMI

10:38 – Introducing Sunday

11:57 – Sunday’s Robot Design Philosophy

15:05 – Sunday’s Shipping Timeline

19:02 – Scale of Sunday’s Training Data

23:58 – Importance of Data Quality at Scale

24:56 – Technical Challenges

27:59 – When Will People Have Home Robots?

30:48 – Failures of Past Demos

32:34 – Sunday’s Demos

36:53 – What Sunday’s Hiring For

39:10 – Conclusion