// MIT TECH REVIEW — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
I watched a humanoid robot clean my apartment. It felt like a taste of the future.
The startup Tau Robotics is sending humanoid robots to clean San Francisco homes. They still need lots of human guidance, but they’re learning.
I’m not the sort of person who typically pays for a house cleaner. I’m too frugal, and I kind of enjoy putting on a podcast and going to town on my tub with a Magic Eraser. But when I saw an X post about a new humanoid-robot cleaning service in San Francisco, I immediately signed up for the waitlist. I wanted my apartment to feel like The Jetsons, even if just for an hour.
I was also motivated by journalistic interest. In order to ensure an authentic experience, I didn’t tell Tau Robotics, the startup behind the X post, that I was a journalist—though I did use my real name, so it’s possible someone looked me up. Tau’s long-term goal is to make autonomous cleaning robots a reality, but they’re not quite there yet: For now, the robots are piloted remotely by humans, who watch what’s going on via cameras mounted in the robots’ heads and wrists. As the robots clean, they collect data that Tau will use to train up their more independent descendants. Every counter successfully wiped and T-shirt successfully folded will help the models that power the robots learn to do better on the next go-round.
Because this data is so valuable to Tau, the company charges less for cleaning than one might expect for such a cutting-edge product. At the time I booked, Tau was offering $30 for an hourlong cleaning with a single robot; now the charge is $60 per weekly cleaning with two robots, or $100 for a one-time visit. But even at the cheaper rate of $30 per hour, Tau’s robots aren’t a great bargain. They are thorough but slow, so if you, like me, are tempted to stand around watching them for their entire visit, it would probably be a better use of your time to just take care of the cleaning yourself.
But the robots are physically capable of cleaning, and they’re undeniably cute. Tau has armed each four-and-a-half-foot-tall robot with a 3D-printed “head” with antennae that allow it to communicate with Tau’s headquarters, as well as two 3D-printed claw “hands” (the more humanlike alternatives apparently aren’t durable enough, and claws do surprisingly well for most cleaning tasks). Mine was wearing a Tau Robotics shirt, and grippy socks so that it didn’t scratch hardwood floors.
With all the human support they need, the robots are closer to radio-controlled cars than Waymos. Many tasks, such as making the bed and folding laundry, require what’s called kinematic guidance: The human pilot performs the necessary motions, and sensors transmit those movements to the robot, which copies them. These kinematically guided tasks produce especially valuable training data. Tau’s AI models might not have solved laundry folding yet, but learning from the examples of robots that have completed the task in the real world is how they’ll get there.
But according to Tau cofounder Cornelia Weinzierl, to whom I came clean as a journalist a few weeks after the cleaning, the robot can already complete some other tasks—such as vacuuming and mopping—without any human help. If Tau succeeds in using all the data it is collecting to train truly autonomous cleaning robots, they could even become San Francisco’s newest tech tourist attraction as Waymos become more commonplace countrywide.
The cleaning robot that came to my building last month was already a bit of a spectacle. It arrived in a blue minivan, out of which it was helped by Weinzierl and another Tau employee. That’s when the robot encountered its first obstacle: the eight stairs leading up to the building’s front door. I’d come down to greet Weinzierl and the robot, so I had a front-row seat to its struggles with my steps. It climbed as if it were drunk. Each successful step was as likely as not to be followed by a stumbling backward stagger that erased all its progress—though, impressively, it never entirely lost its footing.
When I later discussed my experience with W