World model

A world model is a robot’s internal sense of how its surroundings work. Think of how you can picture a glass tipping over before you knock it. A world model gives a robot a rough version of that same foresight.

Without one, a robot mostly follows moves it has been shown or programmed. With one, it can try out a few options in its head and pick the one most likely to work, like stepping around a chair instead of walking into it.

Companies build world models by feeding the software huge amounts of video and real robot experience. Noetix, for example, launched a world-model design called HERON in 2026, hoping its classroom robots will eventually gather the experience needed to train it.

In practice, world models are still early. A robot can predict wrongly in a room it has never seen, which is why most home robots today still do narrow, well-rehearsed tasks.