For homeowners who would rather avoid the never-ending list of household chores, a new service in San Francisco may sound like a glimpse of the future.
“Yeah, yesterday we made it public that we are starting to offer a cleaning service with humanoids in SF,” Alex Koch, CEO and co-founder of Tau Robotics, told ABC7.
Tau Robotics is making its humanoid robot cleaning service available to a select group of applicants in San Francisco, charging $30 per hour.
For now, Koch said, artificial intelligence is not yet advanced enough to operate the robots entirely on its own. Instead, each humanoid robot is guided remotely by a human operator working from a central location, with AI assisting in the process.
Koch told ABC7 the company’s broader aim is to make home cleaning services more accessible to more people.
Videos posted on Tau Robotics’s website show the robots handling a range of household cleaning tasks, including wiping down counters, tables and worktops, vacuuming floors, taking out the trash and tidying clutter. In one clip, a robot is seen stepping out of a minivan before heading into a cleaning job.
Still, not everyone is convinced that humanoid robot cleaners are ready for widespread use. Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley engineering professor with four decades of experience in the field, told ABC7 he remains skeptical that the robots can clean homes efficiently.
“I would be very surprised if these could do anything close to a useful job of cleaning a house. So, being able to pick up objects off the floor is even still a challenge for robots today,” Goldberg told the station. “And being able to sweep and wipe out areas of, you know, counters and underneath things, that is very, very difficult.”
He also questioned the validity of the tech company’s videos showing the robots cleaning.
“You don’t know if it’s been speeded up, you don’t know if there’s a human behind-the-scenes, you don’t know if they’ve kind of very carefully constructed the environment just right, so it works that time,” Goldberg said.
Koch, however, told ABC7 that the robots are in fact already capable of handling a lot of household tasks.
“But like, vacuum cleaning for example, that’s working pretty well already. And yeah, like basic, wiping the kitchen counter. That’s also pretty doable,” Koch said.
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