No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups Sunday Robotics: Scaling the Home Robot Revolution with Co-Founders Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi
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Nov 19, 2025 
Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, co-founders of Sunday Robotics, dive into the exciting future of home robots. They discuss the revolutionary Memo, designed to handle chores and free up your time. With insights into their innovative UMI glove for data collection and the challenges of employing imitation learning, they shed light on their 2026 beta program. Zhao and Chi also emphasize the importance of design philosophy in making robots accessible and friendly, while addressing the scaling of training data and the roadmap to widespread robot deployment.
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Robotics At A Tipping Point
- Robotics is between a GPT technology breakthrough and a consumer ChatGPT product moment.
- Scaling data and engineering into a product remains the key missing step, Tony Zhao says.
Diffusion Policies Unlock Robust Imitation
- Diffusion policies let models represent multiple valid actions for the same observation.
- That stability unlocked more scalable imitation learning and data collection, Cheng Chi explains.
GoPro + 3D‑Printed Gripper Bootstrapped Data
- Cheng built a simple 3D‑printed UMI gripper and collected ~1,500 real-world cup-serving clips with three students.
- That small dataset enabled an end‑to‑end model that generalized across campus environments.