Sunday: The Robot Trained by Gloves

Two Stanford robotics students build some of the cheapest serious robots in the field, then find a way to teach robots without using robots at all. In 2024 they put those ideas together, design a glove before they design a body, and send it into hundreds of homes. This is the story of Sunday and its wheeled home robot, Memo, trained on recordings of paid “Memory Developers” doing real chores in gloves shaped like the robot’s hands. We follow it from Aloha, Diffusion Policy and the Universal Manipulation Interface, through a $1.15 billion valuation and a 99.1% laundry-folding claim, to a promise of robots in about 50 family homes by Thanksgiving. Then we ask the skeptic’s question: why would a robot on wheels, taught by people in gloves, beat the humanoids from 1X, Figure and Tesla? Narrated by Maya, an AI voice. Researched and written by Charles-Olivier Amyot. Midflight is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any company discussed. In this episode * Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi’s research: Aloha and ACT, Mobile Aloha, Diffusion Policy, and the Universal Manipulation Interface * The Skill Capture Glove, the paid Memory Developers, and why Sunday built a hundred gloves before one robot * Memo’s design: wheels, a telescoping spine, a silicone shell, and passive stability * The $165 million Series B, the “dishwasher wars” with Figure, and the ACT-2 laundry result (778 of 785, company-reported and unaudited) * The home robot graveyard (Willow Garage’s PR2, Jibo, Anki, Kuri, Pepper, and iRobot’s bankruptcy) and the napkin math behind a $1.15 billion valuation The number to watchHow many Founding Family homes actually have a working Memo by the end of 2026, against a target of about 50, and whether Sunday publishes how often those robots need human help. As of October 9, 2026, no delivery has been publicly confirmed. How we label factsCompany claims are called claims, single-outlet stories are called reports, and claims made in lawsuits are called allegations, alongside the company’s response. This episode is not investment advice. Sources * Sunday launch release, November 2025 * Humanoids Daily, Memo and the $200 gloves * Humanoids Daily, 100 gloves before one robot * Business Insider via AOL, gloves vs teleoperation * GlobeNewswire, Series B release * TechCrunch, $1.15B valuation * Sunday, ACT-2 preview * Physical AI Guide, what the ACT-2 numbers prove * UMI paper (Chi et al.) * ALOHA and ACT paper (Zhao et al.) * MIT Technology Review, Mobile Aloha * Electrek, Tesla engineers join Sunday This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit midflightfm.substack.com