Big vacuum is watching as robo-cleaners put humans behind the wheel

offbeat

Like a Waymo mated with a Roomba

The dream of having a mechanical maid to clean your home is real … sort of. San Francisco residents can now hire a robot cleaner for just $30 an hour, but there’s a catch. The robots are at least partially controlled by humans who are watching your home remotely. 

Tau Robotics cofounder and CEO Alexander Koch announced in a post on X Tuesday that his company was launching the waitlist for its invite-only cleaning services on Tau’s website. 

Bereft of details like the specifics of the robot’s capabilities, Tau’s website is instead largely devoted to videos of the diminutive, router-headed, frog-eyed robot doing stuff. It’s shown in various videos and still shots hopping out of a minivan and grabbing its work bag, wiping down the inside of a refrigerator, cleaning surfaces, vacuuming, and emptying trash cans with its pincer-like hands. 

The site also presents three featured house-cleaning robots for San Francisco: “Chelsea,” which specializes in cleaning kitchens and bathrooms; “Elon,” which Tau says learns where household items belong after a few recurring visits and returns them there; and “Tony,” a deep-cleaning specialist.

Koch claimed on X that none of the videos of the robot are sped up to make it look more natural, giving it a weirdly human way of moving that suggests Tau has developed a pretty robust robot – if the company is the one that actually designed it.

That doesn’t appear to be the case, however. Koch told us that the robot’s cameras, claws, and onboard compute system were designed in house, but the rest of the hardware comes from Chinese robot maker Unitree. Hopefully Tau has enough spares lying around since the Trump administration just banned imports of foreign robots. 

Peek-a-boo: Tau operators see you

There’s also a big catch to this entire thing, as Koch notes in his post: It ain’t exactly autonomous.

“Each humanoid is jointly controlled by a human operator and AI,” the Tau CEO said. An AI policy is always controlling the robot’s motors, Koch explained in a LinkedIn chat, but there’s always a human involved, too. 

“A human operator is always guiding that [AI] policy, sometimes directly and sometimes through higher-level instructions,” Koch said. “The balance varies by task.”

The Tau CEO went on to tell us that he sees the project as “conceptually similar to autonomous driving,” meaning that human operators are fully behind the wheel for now, and over time will only be there for safety before eventually being phased out entirely. 

As explained further in the company’s service privacy policy, each robot is controlled in real time by a human operator during cleaning visits, although Tau says the robots are jointly controlled by AI and a human operator. Some operators are Tau employees and some are placed through a staffing agency, but all of them are working on-site at Tau’s facility and have been background checked and trained by Tau, the company claims.

“We plan to enable remote supervision from other locations in the future,” Koch told us.

That said, the robots are still capturing video to train Tau’s AI cleaning models that the company said it hopes “will eventually do the job without a human operator.” That video is stored indefinitely unless customers request it be deleted. Operators, support staff, engineers, and third-party service providers all have access to those videos even if Tau doesn’t sell them or share anything for advertising purposes, and the company said recordings will include full video of every person in the home as well. Be sure to put some pants on before the thing visits, in other words. 

If you’re still keen to let a human-operated robomaid into your house, you’d better get in line: Koch told us that each cleaning session is just one hour and so far “several hundred people” have signed up to be granted a spot. ®