People in San Francisco can now pay for humanoid robots to clean their homes, but for now remote human pilots do much of the work. That is the picture from a hands-on test published on 6 November by MIT Technology Review, whose reporter booked two visits from Tau Robotics’ beta service.
Tau now charges $60 for a weekly clean with two robots, or $100 for a one-off visit, up from an earlier $30 for one robot for an hour. The robots are operated from the company’s headquarters, and tasks such as making beds and folding laundry need “kinematic guidance”, where an operator’s movements are passed to the robot. Co-founder Cornelia Weinzierl told the magazine the robots can already vacuum and mop without help. The magazine reports the company has completed “only a couple hundred cleanings so far”.
The test showed the limits. A carpeted staircase “defeated the robot entirely”, one visit ended early when heat shut down the operator’s viewing equipment (Tau refunded it), and a toppled air purifier was left where it fell. The second visit went better.
Why it matters: this is a paid service, not a demo video, and it shows how home robots are being built today. People steer the robot, and every job becomes training data for more independent machines later. Read more: How robots learn.
Source: MIT Technology Review