San Francisco residents can now hire humanoid robots to clean their homes for $30 an hour, as the robotics startup Tau Robotics tests whether machines can handle everyday household chores.
The company launched the cleaning service last month, offering robots that can vacuum floors, wipe kitchen counters, clean surfaces, take out the trash, and tidy up everyday clutter. The robots are dressed in black Tau Robotics uniforms and have names such as Chelsea, Elon, and Tony.
Each robot costs around $50,000 to build and is trained using AI. Tau Robotics CEO and co-founder Alexander Koch has said the initial goal is to train the machines to imitate human performance before eventually helping them exceed it.
The service costs $30 for 60 minutes with one humanoid. Customers can also book two robots for $60 an hour. For comparison, San Francisco’s minimum wage is currently $19.61 an hour.
The service is currently invite-only, with interested residents required to sign up and join a waitlist. Koch said many of the company’s initial customers are people who did not previously have house cleaners or did not use human cleaners frequently.
Despite their humanoid appearance, the robots are not fully autonomous. Koch said a human is always supervising the AI and guiding the robots at different levels. The machines currently cannot perform certain basic tasks independently. For example, they do not know how to walk upstairs or decide where to vacuum, with those actions largely directed by humans.
Remote technicians supervise the robots and can intervene when they get stuck. Tau has described the current system as a learning process as it works towards greater autonomy.
The technology has also drawn skepticism from robotics experts. Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley engineering professor, said it is still too early to expect humanoid robots to do anything close to a useful job cleaning an entire house.
Goldberg pointed to challenges such as picking up objects from the floor, sweeping, and wiping counters. He also questioned whether videos showing the robots working provide enough evidence of their real-world capabilities.
The robots use two cameras as their eyes, and the footage they collect is used to train Tau’s AI and improve its capabilities. Experts have warned that the cameras could inadvertently capture sensitive information, such as receipts, bills, and other private items, inside homes.
Koch said Tau has ‘full control’ over the information collected, adding that the camera system, networking and computers are all our own. For now, San Francisco’s experiment offers a glimpse of what home cleaning could look like in the future, but the technology still depends heavily on humans behind the scenes.
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