A San Francisco startup sent a humanoid robot to clean a reporter's apartment, but a person was steering it from afar. Fully independent home robots are not here yet.
A humanoid robot cleaned a reporter's apartment in San Francisco, but it was not working alone. A person was steering it remotely, watching the room through the robot's own cameras. The test shows how close home cleaning robots are, and how far they still have to go.
Grace Huckins of MIT Technology Review saw a post on X about a new humanoid-robot cleaning service and joined the waitlist. She wanted her apartment to feel like The Jetsons, even for an hour. The robot that arrived belongs to Tau Robotics, a San Francisco startup.
The company's long-term goal is cleaning robots that work fully on their own. The technology is not there yet. For now, humans pilot the robots remotely through onboard cameras. Huckins describes some unexpected challenges, along with moments that felt like a glimpse of the future.
A humanoid robot is a machine shaped like a person. Here it is offered as a cleaning service people can sign up for, not just a lab demo. But because a human operator does the thinking, the service is closer to remote-controlled help than to a robot that handles chores by itself.
The material does not say what the service costs or when it might reach other cities. It also does not say how many robots Tau Robotics runs or how many people operate them. Huckins' full report covers how well the machine cleaned her home and how close fully autonomous household robots really are.
Robot house cleaning is becoming a service you can book, but for now a human is still doing the steering behind the scenes.
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