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

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 explain