> The company says the robot completes Laundry Flow and Daily Reset tasks autonomously by default, but uses teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion.
Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance.
Holy dystopian shit, you might be right. This might just be their new favorite answer when people ask what are all the jobless humans to do after the AI takeover? This... live in squalor, hooked up to VR headsets and doing menial work remotely for the oligarch class, while the AI learns the last few non-automated tasks from them. It's a theme I've seen in many movies over the years.
Or maybe it can be used to provide job opportunities to people currently underserved, for example, if you are bound to a hospital bed you can get a VR telepresence job to make some money and help pay your medical bills.
We're doomed if regular people have fully absorbed the propaganda to the extent that they'd think asking invalid hospital-bed-ridden people to work remotely for the uber-rich rather than fixing the tax situation so that those uber-rich can buy one less golden toilet for their private planes (and the state can provide for those poor people) is a good idea.
The math doesn't math. You could tax all the ultra rich people at 100% and it wouldn't significantly change the social contract. The part people don't like hearing is that it's a lot of the middle class that has to pay much higher taxes if you want those guarantees of minimum living standards.
If you assume your taxation mechanism is actually perfect and actually gets you the theoretical maximum amount of money from the ultra rich, or even the fairly rich, it's still orders of magnitude less than it costs to make sure everyone is taken care of like the scenario we were talking about above.
I think that's a very different goal post. We were talking about the social contract, publicly funded services. You must realize it's just not a meaningful amount, right? That was my initial point. If you want a real safety net, you have to tax the middle class, and a lot.
That's not really how that works. Almost all of that money is tied up in operating businesses. Most very rich people mostly hold investments in stock - and generally at large companies. That's debt, not an asset I think the way you're thinking of. Overall, taking that money out of market holdings reduces the value of those holdings, for everyone else as well. You really end up lowering the retirement savings value of everyone who has a retirement plan by some amount.
That's an ever-dwindling section of the population. Middle class and upper middle class is going away, we're very clearly heading towards ultra-polarization.
For some reason I always get pushback for pointing it out, but we are very quickly heading towards a bifurcated world like Elysium, possibly minus the space station, where a tiny ultra-rich class lives in luxury while physically separated and protected from billions who live in squalor. We're producing everything needed to build and enforce that world!
How is it worse compared with workers that are currently employed by the oligarch class? It's not like they don't have people doing menial work for them right now. And automation of menial work is a good thing!
Do you think the current AI automated menial work and left only the fun parts? It seems like the opposite, it took any fun from coding and left the drudgery of debugging code one didn't write intact.
Alex Rivera's 2008 movie Sleep Dealer is not without flaws, but it left quite an impression on me. I watched it it after seeing it recommended here in a comments thread on an article about military drone operators, I should probably watch it again with fresh eyes.
EDIT: Jeez, it looks like that's an 11 years old thread. Time does indeed fly.
EDIT 2: The source for the claim is paywalled, but this is how the Cultural impact chapter of the movie's Wikipedia page closes:
> In 2025, Rivera noted that a tech CEO claimed the film had been an inspiration for his company to employ a remote labour force in the Global South in order to operate robots in the Global North, and that the film has been used in pitch decks for various start-ups.
... once again bringing to mind the "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus" meme.
Nah. At least with Uber the driver has self-preservation as an incentive to not just fuck around. What incentive would a freelance nobody have to not do the funniest shit possible inside a stranger's home at least once.
If I wanted someone taking a look at all the stuff in my home, I'd just pay a cleaner here instead of one behind a desk in what I assume is a low-labor-cost locale. For $50/hr I can have them come in every day for 160 days, and they can manage stairs.
Except these ai fucks are trying to put cameras on all such labor to train future world models and businesses are okay with it since they get paid for doing nothing extra. So yeah they can manage stairs but they might also be recording everything they do
Think of 90 y.o. lonely people who can't care less about some company seeing the interior of their house. Surely, it is a risk, but being without any help and assistance.
Most 90 year old lonely people would probably benefit more from an actual human carer than some clanker that can't do stairs, any kind of mobility assistance and can't even make them a cup of tea.
I am sure one of these companies will fuck up and do that. But for the most part, that kind of problem is pretty easy to avoid. Any company using computer vision knows that now, and has high standards of operation (usually by contracting with companies that then have that incentive) to stop that from happening.
I get that it's funny, but that's almost never true. And the business risk is on the robotics company. That's why I'm saying maybe somewhere it happens once, but it's just like safety and Uber drivers, the scrutiny on the brand causes really good incentives. Uber is way way safer than taxis ever were, or are. Women even drive for Uber - they could never have been safe driving taxis.
> Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance.
This will almost certainly depend on the customer and residence. I don't think subscription pricing will be fair, but it can at least be budgeted for out of pensions and such for the people needing to pay for assistance.
Given how incapable my robotic vacuums and lawnmowers have proven to be, even after several years of iterations, I’d almost prefer if it was all teleoperation and it would hopefully unlock a huge amount of additional tasks it could preform. This would essentially let me hire a human housekeeper at a global vs local wage which is very appealing.
IMO, hard part is likely the lack of haptic feedback, not that it's just a simple gripper. Small and big feedback, so you don't break eggs (not accidentally at least), and also don't pick up a heavy load that makes the robot topple over and give the remote operator motion sickness in the process.
There's a surprising number of labour simulators sold as VR headset games:
I’m not sure remote operations needs to be like a VR sim or joystick control of every movement. It might be something more similar to prompts. “Go to front door” “bring in packages” “open packages” “sort trash into pile” <click for item select>”is not trash” “take trash to bin”. Once the house is mapped and a good deal of these routines are learned they can be executed with some fuzzy input to the automation. In my mind this is still full teleoperation
It would be great if the operator could say things like, in above example, “you forgot to close the door, make sure you never leave this door open, even if you have to open it for a task and it’s not explicitly said you should always imply the door needs to be closed after the task. As a general rule, the door should never be open longer than 1 minute longer than it needs to be for task performance” or something similar and this trains the model over time.
I could sweep, mop, vacuum, etc with just my thumb and index finger if needed. But I agree, it’s a limiting design. Probably something they will want to grow beyond eventually. They’ve intentionally handicapped this version, but if they went with a human operated system then maybe they would have seen more potential and given it extra attention. Also, would be interesting if this thing could swap out its “hands” as different jobs may do better with different designs.
It's not a bad business idea, but has dystopian vibes. The human doesn't have to travel to the job site, they don't need to be paid a wage that allows them to exist in an expensive city, and they can watch N screens simultaneously, intervening only when needed. Maybe 1 OOM greater throughput per human-hour. The human teleoperator is also valuable non-public training data, which is part of the learning flywheel. That training data can be sold or kept as a private moat.
How is it any more dystopian than any other offshoring that exist primarily as labor arbitrage?
My in-laws have a full time live in housekeeper that costs $500 per month. And where she’s from, this is a huge opportunity that she went to “maid school” for and many consider excellent compensation. She’s able to send this money home and provides for many family members and has amassed a bit of a real estate empire back home. But, she is absentee. She lives away and rarely gets to visit only about 2-3 weeks a year. So I feel that’s quite sad. They obviously don’t live in the US, because this employment would cost many times more here and probably impossible to even get the proper visas.
Now if this maid was able to live in her village, with her family, and make the same income but perform her tasks through a robot then I think she’d see immediate value in that. So would consumers in America who would love to have housekeepers but can’t afford the local labor rates. Even if you can afford some here, you could get much more for the same budget. A lot of Americans pay this rate for 1-2 cleanings per month, that’s dumb money if you could spend it on something that would sweep up every crumb the day it hit the ground.
Your robotic vacuums and lawnmowers are at a much lower price point that can't afford to run an LBM or computer vision to learn how to do a good job. Because those tasks are too specialized, it's unlikely anyone would pay $8000 for one that did a great job, but the technology is totally there.
The key is when the robot can use all the same tools you can, the generalist robot has a value high enough to pay for this technology.
This sort of menial task would likely be given to someone in a poorer part of the world, who ironically will be some of the first to master the first generation of remotely operated high tech robots.
The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots.
> The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots
If anything, robots will make rich people richer and their position more secure. Once again, you're hoping for a technological solution to non-technological problems
Upon re-reading it, yes, I apologize, got it wrong. An army of poor people remotely controlling an army of robots already implanted into rich houses would be fun.
Like how operating systems get disabled when someone launches a DDOS? :P
Even if robots do get disabled in just 5 minutes, 30 seconds of surprise is plenty for a coordinated decapitation strike (both literally and metaphorically) once enough of the leadership (national or business, take your pick) normalise having these around them, in their homes, preparing things for the next morning while the owners sleep.
Even on a small scale, some random hacker's going to turn one of these into "Mr Stabby the 100% Deniable Assassin". I'm fairly confident this prediction will be ignored until it happens, and moderately confident that when it does some newspaper will find this quotation and use it as their headline.
>> Sleep Dealer depicts a dystopian future to explore ways in which technology both oppresses and connects migrants.[2] A fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico-US immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants.
Not for nothing. None of these companies are going to prioritize difficult physical prevention of you running your own OS, and there are already open source robotics companies where you can run your own stack. A lot of the brain hardware in these things is going to be Nvidia Jetson.
Totally agree but the idea is this gives you a teleoperation environment that is truly on policy and not some artificial lab. The idea is that these robots, like those Amazon stores, are predominantly just controlled by actual humans.
Hey I totally agree I do not want a teleoperator looking into my house, it’s just so deliciously tempting to get in home on policy data. Not sure the reason why they are super interested in home environments vs business or public spaces.
There are at least two companies out there that can fold some laundry in a controlled environment already. At this point it's just a matter of categorizing fabrics and shapes and expanding that knowledge. Two years at the outside until it can fold 80% of your laundry.
This is basically a solved problem. Humans have latency, more than your Internet connection. We predict what's going to happen based on the shapes we see. Computer vision and LBMs do the same thing.
Yeah, again the WYSIWYG model of AI: if you see a robot folding a shirt, that robot can fold that shirt. Maybe it can fold another that's very similar, maybe only different in colour, but don't bet your money on it.
A robot folds a shirt and you think it can fold a tee? Not unless it's explicitly trained to fold that one tee, too.
I think blankets are harder simply because of their size. I often have to "whip" the blanket to get the other end to properly fold on itself. I also use a much large space because of the size (often the floor). Could a robot fold a big blanket? Probably? But what is the success rate going to be? If I just have to refold it 50% of the time, is that actually worth it?
"Is Isaac 1 teleoperated? Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks."
Completely offline will literally never happen at least not in any sort of off-the-shelf consumer product maybe in some sort of niche projects down the line
so just a quick counterpoint ---> I played around with qwen 2.5 4B recently locally. An older model and a tiny model.
Tested this model with optimized harness and it was good enough that it was able to complete (sometimes) a full job application flow for given json user data.
All that to say, I think that there is a strong possibility that we will even just with llm tech, develop it enough that local efficient models are entirely sufficient on their own to be able to drive basic robot 'harness'.
But we almost certainly will not be seeing that as the product from the corporations because they desperately want and need that data about you, for the same reason many tv (lcd/etc) companies make more money from 'ads' then from selling the tvs.
I’d disagree with this. As local models and compute improve, I can definitely see something like this becoming doable offline in the next decades. In the meantime, at the very least, I would never use something like this unless I could bring my own API/cloud provider so that my data isn’t being handled by the vendor. Also teleoperation is a huge no go for me.
Generally when people have a house cleaner they know who it is and have some form of relationship with them that establishes a baseline of trust. That would not exist here.
Eh, there's no reason why you can't choose your robot's teleoperator(s). Say the company has a page where you can check their profiles and even communicate with them.
And if robot companies were prepared to drop the pretense of robotic autonomy and sell you a by-default teleoperated robot service instead, you could always directly communicate with your robot's teleoperator while they're doing their job. Just talk to the robot, and the teleoperator replies, yes?
It's not really the same unless the human cleaner also wears a gopro to record and archive their entire cleaning session for later review (and potential sale to data brokers when the cleaning company wants more money).
So the play here is obvious, use the teleoperation as training data for a more general purpose AI controller. You need that data to make a model in the first place.
What doesn't make sense to me is the cost. Yes, $8000 is probably low for this robot but it's a reasonable price range for something like this. The AI credits though? I know vision LLMs are not cheap, they're not going to run something like Llama3.2vision on every frame. Very curious about the embodied AI architecture that this is going to use, and how it can get cheap enough that it's not going to use $500/month in electricity every month.
8k is cheap if laundry is fully offloaded but will a regular consumer spend 8k on a device that is not proven? I guess there is a subset of consumers that this automatically targets/caters to.
Set price too low to be truly rare luxury show off item, but high enough that expendable income is necessary for first movers. Trade in kind by "gifting" to influencer types: the pop science tech nerd ones to legitimize it by scrutinizing current downsides, the effortlessly luxurious ones to establish it as a brand, and a few mom-core ones to seed the aspiration). Develop better versions from the initial data, drop prices a few times a year via holiday sale or via model deprecation, keep current model pricing high. Develop 3rd Gen and introduce "pro" tier. Very tried and true strategy (many step omissions of course) and imo they nailed the price point for initial show off. It's not really affordable for its market but it's also not unaffordable if you consider the costs of what it would replace if it turns out to work!
You’re not replacing the outsourcing it component though, you’re replacing a maid at home doing it for you. In home laundry services are a very different experience since you don’t have to also go pick up and drop off the laundry.
A service like that can be hundreds a month, so pay off period is on the order of years… which could be worth it.
I'd pay $8k tomorrow for a bot that would 100% do my laundry. That means collecting it from the various dirty clothes hampers throughout the house, bringing it to the washer and dryer, operating the washer/dryer, folding and putting clothes on hangers, and putting them back into the dresser and hung up in closets.
For a bot that just automates an in-house laundry service that washes and folds? Not very interesting since it might save maybe 60% of the time, but practically zero percent of the mental overhead.
This seems like a step towards that I suppose. My house isn't configured to make it an option even if it was a fully-baked product, but if these ever get to the point of actually working without remote teleoperation I'd certainly be in the market.
Unless I was physically disabled, elderly, or otherwise unable to do my own laundry, I couldn't even fathom paying a robot (or a maid) to do it. I can maybe understand it if you don't have a clothes washer, and had to wash your clothes manually in the sink or tub or something, but with a washing machine, the machine is already doing 95% of the work! The rest is not difficult or time-consuming. Laundry isn't heavy, and it doesn't take specialized skill or concentration to put them in the machine, start it, or remove them. Not saying your wrong for wanting something like this, but just observing how different people can be with their priorities.
really? you cannot _fathom_ the idea of paying for a robot to do something you, yourself are already capable of doing? someone should tell all these car manufacturers and the like that their cost-benefit analyses of using robots for work humans can do are completely off!
You have a certain number of hours remaining on earth, and that number goes down forever until it reaches zero.
Get on the cross about... doing laundry, I guess? All you want but it's not crazy to want to maximize the amount of time you get to spend with novel, meaningful experience and minimize the amount of time you spend shuffling piles of clothing from one place to another over and over among the dozens of other mundane chores.
They're talking about a household chore and your post compares to an industrial production line. It's not like the Ford executives can walk into the laundry and assemble F-150s.
It's way less about the time of doing the thing, and much more about the mental overhead of having to remember to do the thing. And needing to do the thing at very inconvenient times because I forgot to do the thing or lacked motivation when I should have done the thing.
This goes for any recurring chore in my life. I love to garden, but watering plants is hell to me after the novelty wears off. I fixed this by installing an automated irrigation system. I get to do the fun bits mostly on my schedule to wind down when I feel like it (pruning, harvesting, staring at plants) and didn't sign myself up for yet another daily chore to do.
My wife is the opposite. She thrives on "chores" or routine simple items like this. She absolutely loves doing laundry to an absurd degree - kind of a zen moment in the middle of her day she can quickly spend 10 minutes here and there to get done. Same goes for cooking. I enjoy planning and creating elaborate meals I've dialed into "perfection" but take me an entire Saturday to accomplish a few times a year. She loves spending 30 minutes in the kitchen most nights to wind down after work - but really hates "big" projects of any type.
I imagine it has a lot to do with executive function. I enjoy large one-off projects (e.g. designing and installing an over the top totally overkill irrigation system) that are eventually "done" but fall apart on repetitive simple things that never end and just reset to be done X hours all over again. I like to have my "mental slate" clean when I wake up for the day, and I find I accomplish far more when I can configure my life in such a way.
As such, this robot as-is would be somewhat useless to me as I'd have to remember to hang up the clothes or walk them up the stairs to put away or whatever even with it. I'd get very little advantage for the spend.
> but with a washing machine, the machine is already doing 95% of the work!
Not sure how literal you were here or if it's more a feeling thing to you: My washing machine takes 1-2 hours per run. I don't believe you (or anyone else) can do all other attached work in 5 Minutes, or anywhere close to it.
We can't even get to a washing machine that's also the dryer though. If it seems hard to get people to adopt even that new technology, then clothes folding is never gonna happen.
I doubt it will ever be cheaper than doing it yourself, like most things in life. The market is for people unable or unwilling to do it themselves.
Outsourcing can be difficult and expensive in many regions. The lack of an actual human might even be considered a benefit in some cases, such as nursing homes (although you have to weigh the benefits of human contact with the benefits of fewer humans spreading plagues).
The world of computer vision is much bigger than multimodal LLMs. You'd run an ensemble of specialized models for 3d mapping, object classification, path validation, and so on. On a raspberry pi 5 8gb you can run what you need to self drive an RC car on an obstacle track at 10 FPS.
Today, a lot of it is just integrated VLAs. End to end backprop covers a multitude of sins - a single integrated model stack in cross-attention beats "an ensemble of specialized models".
> So the play here is obvious, use the teleoperation as training data for a more general purpose AI controller.
Strong disagree: the play here is to use teleoperation, claim it's AI, make a shit-ton of money and cash out before the house of cards come tumbling down.
The way one of their employees told me it to me as like a dishwasher.
Of course the dishwasher should be more expensive. When you add up the hours in labor saved and multiply by the hourly median wage, you get something in the $50k to $100k range.
But it's essentially just a sprinkler.
Ain't no one going to to pay the cost of a new BMW for a dishwasher.
Same thing here for the laundro-bots. Their competition isn't against the time saved for a person to do it themselves. The competition is a maid that does your whole house for $70.
> Of course the dishwasher should be more expensive. When you add up the hours in labor saved and multiply by the hourly median wage, you get something in the $50k to $100k range.
Except most dishwashers aren't competing against people washing dishes by hand and making the hourly median wage, they're competing against other dishwashers
>> Very curious about the embodied AI architecture that this is going to use, and how it can get cheap enough that it's not going to use $500/month in electricity every month.
In practice most of the costs would be the teleoperation costs rather than AI inference.
While I find robots cool they just don't literally "fit" in an average flat or house I lived in majority of my life. In order to squeeze one more member into your average household the lil thing needs to justify refurbishing the entire place so it can actually operate there without being a nuisance. Reminds of how my relative spent quite a bit of time making sure an old house being renovated was flat enough so automatic vacuum cleaner could traverse room to room without getting stuck. A humanoid robot is larger still. I can see them being adopted by businesses first though.
It doesn't need to have a sleeping surface or stay sprawled out when it isn't in use. It could bunch up into a little ball and fit in the corner of your ceiling. And it doesn't need to be the size of an adult to do most household stuff, some of the unitree ones are really short in stature, a foldable step stool for reaching upper cabinets or changing lightbulbs is probably enough.
A bigger issue is whether it can really be as safe, not trip over wires, throw the baby in the trashcan, start a fire trying to make a cup of coffee and that kind of thing. Beyond accidents, lots of companies are talking about hooking these up to LLMs for planning that have horror movies in their training sets.
The ones with wheels are going to trip over everything. The moment a company has enough functional use cases for one of these that it's not limited to one floor of your house, that version will be bipedal and not trip.
People who have the disposable income to buy $8,000 personal robotic assistants or $20,000 1X Neo are a lot more likely to live in larger spaces. I've got about 1,000 sqft per occupant in my home. Plenty of room for a C-3PO or Johnny 5.
What does it mean "handles"? It doesn't say it puts on a wash, but that's what I'd want. I can only assume they're vague because it doesn't do anything useful.
> Makes beds
A robot the height of a child makes a double bed with sheet, duvet, and pillows? I highly doubt it could reach.
> Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks.
That's a lot of words to say "a person will drive it around your home". What sort of insurance do they have for that person breaking something in your home? What audit trail do they have for the operators?
>What sort of insurance do they have for that person breaking something in your home?
Probably just make the user accept a license agreement saying they accept the risk? I suspect most people would accept the risk something might get broken if it means they no longer need to clean their house.
> Depending on the home in question, Isaac 1 may be able to help with even more within each feature area (such as loading and unloading clothes from washer/dryer machines)
So evidently that isn't included in Laundry flow. Maybe "handles" just means picking up the hamper and moving it to the washing machine? I wonder if it requires a specific hamper for this to work.
I find it very suspicious that the laundry folding segment of the video has awkward cuts of the interesting parts. Makes me question if it is actually capable of doing that
I have a cat who pushed the Roomba out the door where an elk smushed it, turns on the gas fireplace when I’m out of town because he’s an environmental terrorist and stopped shitting in his box when I just put a litter robot in his room. I assume the Dalek would meet some impossible-to-predict horribly fate before the 17-year old cat does.
Yeah I was thinking exactly this. Also I don't think it can reach my dryer.
I am happy this kind of thing is being worked on, I just don't think this is gonna be it - they really talk around what it does but "folding clothes" isn't enough. $8k to handle a complete laundry cycle (including ironing) might be interesting.
From the looks of it, you're gonna need one robot per floor. On the one hand, it's refreshing seeing a robot that's not a creepy humanoid, on the other, how is it gonna deal with steps and stairs ?
The issue is not even teleop as a product. The issue none of these companies talk about is one of state-reset. Even a teleop-ed robot comes nowhere near the dexterity of a human - as the Joanna Stern review of 1x shows: 10 mins to load a dishwasher, 5 mins to get a glass of water, body coming the way of a fridge door, irrecoverable breakdowns every 30 mins...
Consider what happens if it drops some glassware or spills liquids on a carpet in addition (or worse does something stupid with the kitchen appliances). The teleop guy in Phillipines or India can't hop on a plane to fix this.
This 'environment reset' problem is at the core of RL - there are no solutions for this yet, only workarounds.
>> This seems to be a redux of the 1x play (which was panned across the internet after the WSJ review).
For a moment I thought it was the same company.
>> This 'environment reset' problem is at the core of RL - there are no solutions for this yet, only workarounds.
That, and generalisation. A year or so back Aloha made huge waves but teleoperation doesn't solve the fundamental limitation of RL, that you have to train anew for every new environment or task.
When comes to lower part it’s always bipedal (hard to balance) or wheels (low capabilities).
Why no one makes 4-6 legs, insect like?
That seems like an easier problem to solve while gives much better mobility.
They make robot dogs, e.g. famously Boston Dynamics but many others as well. And 6 is probably overkill for price/performance increase incremental to 4. Wheels are still much more practical and you can use them as feet in hybrid designs to be able to step over obstacles but still more agile than comparable bi/quadrupeds
Going from 2 to 4 legs doubles the amount of actuators required and substantially increases power consumption since you must move more mass, going to 6 compounds the problem further. In a future where we have more dense power storage and better (and cheaper!) motors, you probably will see robots with more legs. But for now, the most efficient solutions are bipedal.
Especially because this thing is already $8k, I imagine they have already done some substantial price optimization.
There are millions or billions of quadrupeds surviving on 3 legs every day. 4 legs is evolutionarily superior to 3 but 3 gets the job done, especially if you don't have to worry about agility or repair.
If the robot has two legs with wheels at the ends it could combine speed and flexibility. Adding a third leg for additional stability when the robot needs it might be great. But the third leg would probably need to be between the first two and I don't think humans are mature enough to have that.
It's been done, I don't really know how the efficiency compares but I'm sure there's some research out there on it. The main issue I see though is that the advantage you get with 4+ legs is stability at slow speed - you can be stable on three legs while moving one, which makes precise movement easier.
With three legs, as soon as you pick one up you will start to fall over, so you either need legs with enough freedom of movement to shift the center of mass of the robot back to offset the lack of support, or some other way to shift the center of mass.
You have to balance with two legs, as well, but there isn't a transition from "stable" to "balancing" with every step - you're always actively balancing - which makes movement easier to plan.
Overall I suspect that tripedal locomotion isn't really any more efficient than bipedal movement, and it might even be less stable.
I agree on the rest but don't see why it would be heavier. If you have more feet standing at any particular moment the load would be more distributed, i.e. movement should be easier with more legs (depending on leg weight of course).
You're confusing (pressure on the ground / surface area) with overall weight (the sum of all pressure on the ground). Having more legs is heavier simply because now you have additional struts and motors that you didn't before, those items are linear with the number of legs, and the total weight is weight_of_leg x num_legs.
I wonder how much of it is training data. We can very easily get training data of 'human tasks' because humans can wear tracking suits, and those suits track bipedal movement. Anything we train off that isn't bipedal (ie dogs) don't do human tasks, don't hold anything, so a different set of requirements.
wheels are so much simpler that it seems much easier and more cost efficient to solve the "transporting a wheeled robot up the stairs problem" than it does to go fully bipedal.
Just because a large percentage of the population either lacks the ability to understand why it's bad to have a livestream of your home being sent to China or simply doesn't care doesn't mean it's not a problem.
Second, for robot vacuums you can flash them with Valetudo, a completely local control interface. The robots even run a custom DNS server that prevents them from ever phoning home.
I don't care if nobody else cares, but I care. If someone crafted a home/garden robot that is fully autonomous using local AI or something like that then I'd be interested.
I find the operator point of view equally horrifying.
Likely, they will run an OCR scan to blur any text seen through the cameras. Also likely, they would run a vision model classifying identifiable information: people walking past, hanged photos or even paintings, TV screens, maybe even the view outside the window? For safety purposes, I imagine it's also worth identifying handheld tools such as knives, bats, etc., all done so the operator risks are minimized.
Fair enough, and I'm not arguing against that, there's just something distasteful about the operator having to walk around in a largely obscured, muted camera feed, looking for traces of underwear scattered around the house.
> The company says the robot completes Laundry Flow and Daily Reset tasks autonomously by default, but uses teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion.
Does that mean some random human looking at my dirty laundry in the middle of my home, the most intimate place in existence for me? No thank you.
Understandable reaction. That being said, thousands of people already pay for the privilege of inviting an actual human into their home every week to clean. For those people, that doesn’t seem likely to be a hurdle.
Personally, I’d probably be willing to stomach a teleoperator but what I would not be comfortable with is the company retaining images, video, and other telemetry from my condo on their servers for who knows how long.
That invited stranger is probably not recording footage that will be stored for all time. There were leaks about how Tesla employees were sharing images/videos of customers.
So much more of it, also strangers come and go, they are there, they knock and shout before entering a room where you might be changing clothes or taking shower.
They will not only get leaked and abused internally, it will be also sold.
They will also inevitable get hacked (storage or remote access), operators will be maybe even bribed for remote access to certain users, government will subpoena for remote access credentials and videos (assuming they are not going to be given a direct back door (similar to what Google and Meta did in the last).
Current landscape user privacy in technology is a fucking mess, unless something technically designed (E2E, no remote access etc) to be private it’ll get abused and will be used against you.
As someone who grew up and made a life out of technology I truly hate where we are with it and heavy capitalist and anti-consumer design of almost all new products.
Yea but people invite actual humans into their homes who have names, faces, reputations, relationships, and some degree of social accountability.
If I hire someone to come into my home I can meet them, decide whether I trust them, build familiarity over time, and develop some form of reciprocity. They know whose home they’re entering, and I know who they are.
That feels very different from an anonymous person on the other side of a teleoperated robot... who may be one of many interchangeable operators, switching in and out on some unknown schedule, with no meaningful relationship to me.
Maybe I’m just the wrong audience for this. Because no way am I comfortable with anonymous strangers looking around inside my home.
Yes but I trust the middle aged lady trying to make an honest living than what will likely be an Actually Indian from halfway across the world peeking into my home in a room full of other Indian's gossiping about the customers standards of living. If you don't care that Mr. Joy likes to teleoperate the bot especially while the wife and teenage daughter are active around the house then go for it.
So much of housing in my area is high density now taking the form of row housing with multiple levels. Other homes have laundry in the basement, bedrooms on a second level. Sadly Isaac isn't going to be as useful if you have stairs.
/me gets tempted then looks at his Roomba gathering dust, on itself, for years now.
It's great in theory. I hate chores... but those things don't work. They work-ish in some ideal cases but a house, even a sorted one, is a mess. You have cables, clothes on the floor, etc.
Cleaning up is a menial task but it's not a trivial one, both mechanically and cognitively speaking.
Better than- ups - i wrapped another cord around my tracks- and ripped a appliance +socket from the wall.. or spend thousands making my home robot-ready.
Can this go up and down stairs? If I want my home tidied up, I want the whole home done not just one floor.
For 100 USD I can get a Roomba or Roborock for one floor and because that is so cheap I don’t mind this limitation. But for 8-10k USD I would expect this very common household feature to be solved.
It's inevitable that someone will build a good robot to do these mundane chores. But is that a good thing? I vacuum every night and during that I get some great thinking done. If I had a robot vacuum, I can said with certainty I would make good use of that time.
>> Laundry and tidying are valuable because they recur, generate messy edge cases and create training data. They are also privacy-sensitive and physically variable in ways that robot demos tend to hide.
It's the WISYWYG model of AI: when you watch a video of a (usually humanoid) robot folding laundry, tying shoelaces, hanging shirts etc, it's hard to appreciate the specificity of the observed performance. Which is extreme: a robot folding a t-shirt can only fold that one t-shirt in the video unless it's been explicitly trained to fold... another one. You need to train for every single t-shirt, every single shoe whose laces you want to tie up etc [1].
It's hard to believe because we expect a humanoid that can fold one t-shirt to be able to fold any t-shirt and usually also many if not all other kinds of clothing. But that's not how it works with robots, or in any case their AI. Hence the need to teleoperate.
Btw, no, Transformers have not yet revolutionised the field [2].
As to "fake it 'till you [have enough data to train a super-capable AI and] make it" that's the same bet made by Tesla and its autopilot, and there's still not enough data for a safe/ level-4/5 self-driving car, despite all the cars that Tesla has sold. Nor, dear reader, are Waymo robotaxis level 5 yet (despite them being apparently much safe than anyone else's SDCs).
>> Beds, made. Pillows, blankets, kids' and pets' toys, shoes, back where they belong.
No way modern AI can figure out where "kids' and pets' toys, shoes" belong. As if there's such a thing anyway.
>> With Laundry Flow, Isaac 1 goes beyond folding, finding and picking up dirty clothes and handling loaded hampers.
I put my dirty laundry in a plastic bug under a kitchen cupboard.
I don't think this or the other competitor announced last year will ever ship, or if they do, they'll quickly go out of business. There's no real product there.
Seems like something for people with more money than sense. If you could afford to drop money on this, odds on you can get a weekly maid who will do it for a fraction of the price.
Watching the videos, they have the cleanest kids in that house. The ability to move pillows 4 inches is just blowing my mind.
The practicalities of it work out though. The same way the car replaced the horse and carriage, not having to deal with those messy biologics, means that it becomes a reliable dependable thing in a way that a human maid, with a human life outside of work, just simply isn't, no matter how hard the maid tries.
So here's the thing: Laundry isn't really the chore that eats up my time. It takes like a minute or two to move clothes from the basket to the machine, and seconds to turn it on. Same with moving them to the dryer afterwards.
Same with easy tidying up.
What takes time, however, is cleaning and making food.
Let me blow your mind. The reason laundry doesn't take much of your time is because we built a robot to do it for you and it already handles 99.99% of the job and it costs a couple hundred bucks and it's called a washing machine. This machine costs $8000 and is promising to solve the other 0.01% of the time spent on this job, and it's promising to solve 0.01% of that 0.01%.
Can it vacuum for me? Change the bedding? Can I put it to work in a blacksmith shop? Can it live outside and have the task of picking up leaves from the garden one by one until it finally breaks and causes The Android Uprising?
At that price point, and for the limited value it delivers...I think this is aimed squarely at the upper middle-class people. Those that are rich enough to not feel any economic stress from dropping $8k at a two-trick pony, but not rich enough to have a full-time domestic cleaner. Probably also aimed at the tech conscious people.
Whats doable with todays technology is to give people walking robots[1] and instantly enable last mine connectivity to all metro/train/bus transit.
Bikes (and e-scooters, one wheels) are a decent solution, but you can't take them in most metros or buses. 2nd/3rd world infrastructure is pothole ridden, not even ready for bikes. Walking can take you everywhere.
For some reason, reminds me of Cassandra: https://www.netflix.com/title/81621534. Maybe it's the gripping fingers or the way it rolls around the house in the demo video..
I'm pretty certain that if these were actually ready there'd be commercial uses of them first, where they see a lot more use and thus generate a lot more value than any household has laundry.
Robot operated laundry on a cruise ship or something.
Yeah, but not for this or similar tasks... (unless I'm out of date?)
Working with fabric is notoriously difficult. Doubly so when we're talking random unknown pieces of fabric already sewed together by some third party and not simple rolls of it that need to be transformed in known ways into clothing.
The goal at this stage is largely training data collection so it can reach widescale use. Just like self driving variations in multiple different cities, the data needed for AI robotics is broad with a million niche usecases, so it makes sense it's not strictly commercial.
They need visual recording of tele-operated robots (or humans with headset cameras) doing normal household stuff like folding laundry in real environments so it can be fully automated. Which is what funds a lot of this stuff since that training data is a goldmine right now if a company can collect enough of it.
I think that is backwards. If you are replacing full time staff you need a system that works just as fast for the same or less money. For home use, you don't care if it takes 3 hours to make your bed or just stops for a while when waiting for a teleoperator to become available.
> For home use, you don't care if it takes 3 hours to make your bed or just stops for a while when waiting for a teleoperator to become available.
But why would you pay thousands and store a clunky machine in your home for that? Either you don't care about the bed being made or not -- in which case just don't, its not essential -- or you'd have it made already in 30-60 seconds when you got up before you could even get the thing turned on.
Folding laundry is the same thing. It says 30-90 minutes, I assume for one wash load? A human couldn't possibly take more than 30 minutes. And a human with a folding board could do it in 5-10. So unless you do not care about laundry at all, it would drive you crazy to watch that machine blocking your hallway for over an hour slowly folding a single load.
Alternatively, a wash/dry/fold service will deliver them to your door not just folded, but neatly packed in dustproof bags. (This is a major life hack when packing for a trip btw.)
This thing looks like they should package in a vacuum / floor washer into its base and something to empty/replenish it into that large base unit it docks with.
Hopefully they can pull this off. Aged care is already a problem in many countries, and getting worse with an aging population and lack of workers such as cleaners. Even just laundry could keep people living in their own homes for a few extra years.
I think the first to use such home robots will have is people who can do the tasks but simply don't want to be bothered.
The aged, infirm and disabled are going to need real people for company and to deal with any crises the infirm might have. And since the real people will be there and paid for anyway, the state is unlikely to pay for robots as a quality of life improvement (they'd pay for them if they removed the caregiver but that complete removal will science fiction for a while).
As an example, I work taking care of a partly paralyzed man. He's tried an exoskeleton, believes it would help him a lot but can't afford the many thousands of dollars it would cost. The state pays for 18-hours/day care which is tens of thousands of dollars a month but they have to pay that.
The last time I saw one of these things being promoted I found out all of the "demos" on YouTube had some dude sitting in a closest with a VR headset controlling the whole thing.
I'll buy a robot that can put fitted sheets and fold every piece of laundry no matter how contorted/inside-out it is. Till then, they're just gimmicks. Also, it should have legs.
This is another industry that seems to me a lot like the AI glasses. It's that sweet spot of being extremely difficult to make work, whilst simultaneously offering almost nothing of value.
It's actually striking that what they're promising it can do is almost nothing, and that it still won't be able to do what they claim. "Folds and puts clothes away" - ok, can I see any video of it taking clothes out of a washing machine (it can't), folding them, identifying where the clothes should go and then putting them there, and for example, opening a wardrobe and putting the clothes into the right place - possibly underneath other stuff that's already in there.
That is one of the creepiest things I've seen in a while! And the first time something akin to uncanny valley has gotten me. The way it slowly raises out of its dock. The arms just hanging there in the photo at the bottom. The weirdly broad 'smile' it seems to have (it's just the lip of the head I think, but it looks like a very creepy smile to me). Its slow methodical movements. The way it wheeled past that doorway. Eurghh. Is it just me? I feel like I could never relax with this in my home. Like I'll turn around to find it inches away from me, watching.
This means "constant forced software updates with the potential to brick the product." Just like Nest.
Also likely: Inadequate security so your robot becomes a node in a residential VPN or a botnet. Or some hacker takes over your robot to scope out the interior of your house and sells that info to burglars on the darknet. Or to ICE.
And you know what cannot be improved with software? Sensors. Like the kind in its fingertips that almost certainly are not good enough to allow it to fold laundry reliably.
$450 USD / month to have a human turn up every day? $15 USD per day, including weekends? Around here you might just about get the minimum of 1 hour/day for 10 times that.
This will be life changing for the elderly and disabled if they can pull it off. If you have socialized care, the government would even probably pay since it will be cheaper than aged care facilities.
Why does the human have to turn up every day? You're the one who added that requirement. That's on you.
The moment you reduce it down to 10 visits per month you're already at $45 per visit.
Let's say 6 visits to different people per day and since there are 21 working days per month on average that is 21/10*6*$450 = $5785 or $70k in revenue per year.
You can't tell me that this wouldn't pay for an employee that doesn't require office space. Maybe $450 per month is too cheap and it has to be raised slightly, but this would pay for an entry level cleaner even in San Francisco.
That’s how we ended up where we are. Which is effectively trading privacy to convince and cool everyday. Now the new generation doesn’t even understand what they are selling.
I get what you are saying but unless we call it what it is (which is disgusting) we will just keep getting more of it, and will normalize this bullshit. (Intrusive products are already normalized but maybe we can slow the escalation of their intrusiveness).
Even finding a non cloud-video photo uploading robot vacuum is a challenge if not impossible. Because we accept this bullshit we ended with no alternative privacy oriented design and solutions in the market. Unfortunately people don’t pay enough of a premium for real privacy.
It's not out of some anti-AI ideology. I use LLMs daily. I just don't understand why we need to pay $8,000 for a robot that does exactly two tasks, takes up space in the house, uses power, and needs updates and repairs.
At $15/hr, $8000 is 533 hours. So you are only breaking even if you get more than 22 full days of human folding labor (not the actual, slower time it takes the robot) during the useful life of the machine (probably 2-3yr max since it relies on backend supervision like a waymo). ChatGPT estimates that a human could fold about 27,000 shirts over 533 work hours.
Exactly. With special safeguards to prevent them from "exfiltrating" any of your property or information with the help of accomplices on the ground, online services, or other clever hacks.
Slaves generally get room and board, and always have the opportunity to quit (although the other option is often death, so slavery is preferable.)
I'm not trying to be facetious, I'm trying to tell you that your criteria are not meaningful, and you're pretending like they're obvious. It's why many US slaves moved directly from slavery into sharecropping for the same masters. The only thing that changed was the paperwork. Now they were renters, who could quit (with no assets and no means to feed themselves.)
I once ham-fistedly tried to allude to a similar concept. That slaves were at least "kept" while today's wage slaves have more responsibility, and de facto less freedom due to 'The Matrix' that is our financial and legal system that benefits so few.
We have lords of land. A monetary system based mostly on trickery hidden behind boring math that inexorably erodes the purchasing power of what we receive as compensation for our finite time alive.
So let's just jump to the interesting bit: how do we fix it? Got any ideas?
The solution has always and will always be to respect the laws of thermodynamics and rising entry.
Demurrage [0]
Consider the following: You have a zero lower bound constraint on the interest rate in your economy. The real interest rate falls below zero. What happens? Deflation. Deflation ends up forcing the real interest rate into the positive range even when the nominal equilibrium interest rate would be negative to reach a real interest rate of zero. So in the deflation case, equilibrium simply doesn't happen.
If equilibrium is not possible below zero, then the currency must be operated in the positive interest range. Hence you need eternal inflation to force the interest rates back into positive nominal territory. Since positive nominal interest is still a net inflow of money from consumers (interest is priced into consumer prices) to money holders, the end result is that money flows to those who already have money and way from those who need to fulfill their basic thermodynamic maintenance even in the case where the real interest rate is 0%. Turns out lying about thermodynamics doesn't work in the end, so you get the worst of both worlds: inflation and inequality.
Another way to conceptualize it is that cash is a guaranteed 0% bond and the real interest rate can be negative due to thermodynamics. The government is obligated to pay the difference between the 0% interest rate on money and the real interest rate in the physical economy. It's like the savings that should normally be effected by thermodynamics turn out to be financial garbage and the government obligated itself to buy off the garbage. Of course what happens is that more people produce financial garbage in response to the government's minimum price floor. Eternally rising government debt is a foregone conclusion and it has nothing to do with political incompetence (ok not introducing demurrage or abolishing the ZLB is a form of incompetence, but its a binary matter of doing it).
If you want debt loads to shrink, then borrowers need a form of leverage to reduce the durations of debts. If the contract says the debt must grow over time and holders of money have no duration restriction on their holdings then you would have to be stupid to not expect this output. Note again, its the duration of the positive balances being decoupled from their negative counterpart. The interest payments are just a side effect that accelerates the problem.
Oh and those who obsess over non-money financial assets: Money is a utility and a monopoly. Capital markets have various types/forms of formal agreements based on contracts. People with money would never accept conditions that are worse than the conditions on money, so in the end the capital contracts are just mirroring properties of the money that the original investor is handing over. Debt contracts have fixed terms and payment schedules and liquidation preference/rights upon bankruptcy, whereas most investments do not have that, which is why a risk premium is added on top. An economy without ZLB money but conventional capital market contracts are mostly be fine since thermodynamics/reality are reflected through failure of the investment.
"... teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion."
NOPE. Close tab. If this does not work without an internet connection then it's DOA. I should only have to connect it for software updates. Other than that, the bot is offline, period.
No? Think of a malicious actor hacking into one of these things and using your favorite kitchen knife against you while you sleep. I want a robot where the probability of that occurring is zero.
You shouldn't have to connect it to the Internet, period, even for software updates (SDCards exist). Internet connected in-home devices with cameras and (presumably) microphones = privacy disaster, spyware and telemetry. NOPE for me, too.
The first thing that jumped out at me is its form factor. It is easier to engineer (cheaper) and less threatening than a bipedal robot. The drawback, of course, is that it is less mobile.
Yeah, I would consider getting one for my 94 year old grandmother, but there are 2 steps between her bedroom and the laundry room, and this can't cut it.
Once again, the text is riddled with LLM'isms. Is this the new norm nowadays? Looking at OP's submission history, it's evident that they are utilizing HN for SEO farming.
A much more valuable discussion would be centered around the company's own website, which contains the same information, and doesn't require an LLM mediator: https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-1
Surrogate slavery is going to be a large business one day.
If you are telling me that one day I'll have a robot that cooks, cleans, is a personal assistant, a therapist. Eventually it'll be a chauffeur, babysitter, and obviously sex slave.
Why wouldn't i pay 50000 for that, besides the obvious "you are a creep" like why do I care when it's coming and market forces are going to make it an indistinguishable substitute human a la Joi from blade runner?
> a robot that cooks, cleans, is a personal assistant, a therapist. Eventually it'll be a chauffeur, babysitter, and obviously sex slave.
Used to be called "a wife", before emancipation.
Seriously though, the future is made of human beings more and more isolated from each other because technology will give us all that we used to get from other people, with none of the annoyances. Each the king or queen of their solipsistic kingdom.
I also saw Tesla is ramping up to make millions of Optimus robots. And Amazon bought Fauna robotics which I predict we will start seeing "last 100 ft" deliveries soon. Amazon's Rivian packmobile will pull up to a block and 5 Fauna robots (they are short) will jump out and start delivering packages to the neighborhood.
I mean, it's entirely possible that Elon Musk is lying about the whole humanoid Tesla robot thing and it's a total utter scam and that everything online is just cgi, but let's pretend he's not that much of a scam artist.
They cancelled the production of two vehicles, announced that those lines will be retooled for the robots , and they have jobs recs out. Who knows if they will be able to sell millions but it doesn't sound like they're not trying.
> The company says the robot completes Laundry Flow and Daily Reset tasks autonomously by default, but uses teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion.
Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance.
Same, I suspect its awful and their strategy is to improve and rely less on it, which would be fine to me if they'd be transparent about it.
Can't wait for the Uber version, where anyone with five minutes to spare can fold your laundry from their home.
Holy dystopian shit, you might be right. This might just be their new favorite answer when people ask what are all the jobless humans to do after the AI takeover? This... live in squalor, hooked up to VR headsets and doing menial work remotely for the oligarch class, while the AI learns the last few non-automated tasks from them. It's a theme I've seen in many movies over the years.
Or maybe it can be used to provide job opportunities to people currently underserved, for example, if you are bound to a hospital bed you can get a VR telepresence job to make some money and help pay your medical bills.
Gross.
We're doomed if regular people have fully absorbed the propaganda to the extent that they'd think asking invalid hospital-bed-ridden people to work remotely for the uber-rich rather than fixing the tax situation so that those uber-rich can buy one less golden toilet for their private planes (and the state can provide for those poor people) is a good idea.
I think (hope) the poster who suggested that was being sarcastic, although it's hard to tell anymore!
The math doesn't math. You could tax all the ultra rich people at 100% and it wouldn't significantly change the social contract. The part people don't like hearing is that it's a lot of the middle class that has to pay much higher taxes if you want those guarantees of minimum living standards.
Citation needed.
Here is one for the contrary (just a book review. The citation is the book).
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/06/we-need-to-tax-billiona...
That strongly supports my point. What do you think $250 billion a year worldwide pays for? That's $30 per person per year.
It's $250 billion less that goes to the ultrarich, so that they can't purchase another $250 billion of assets.
After a certain amount of money, financial engineers can basically build all kinds of leveraged instruments that will let you buy those assets anyway.
If you assume your taxation mechanism is actually perfect and actually gets you the theoretical maximum amount of money from the ultra rich, or even the fairly rich, it's still orders of magnitude less than it costs to make sure everyone is taken care of like the scenario we were talking about above.
I think that's a very different goal post. We were talking about the social contract, publicly funded services. You must realize it's just not a meaningful amount, right? That was my initial point. If you want a real safety net, you have to tax the middle class, and a lot.
That's not really how that works. Almost all of that money is tied up in operating businesses. Most very rich people mostly hold investments in stock - and generally at large companies. That's debt, not an asset I think the way you're thinking of. Overall, taking that money out of market holdings reduces the value of those holdings, for everyone else as well. You really end up lowering the retirement savings value of everyone who has a retirement plan by some amount.
The oligarchs just have people to come do these tasks.
The target audience is the “regular-rich bourgeoisie”.
That's an ever-dwindling section of the population. Middle class and upper middle class is going away, we're very clearly heading towards ultra-polarization.
For some reason I always get pushback for pointing it out, but we are very quickly heading towards a bifurcated world like Elysium, possibly minus the space station, where a tiny ultra-rich class lives in luxury while physically separated and protected from billions who live in squalor. We're producing everything needed to build and enforce that world!
Don't worry, Musk is working on the Space Station part ...
So, we'll have Elysium minus the space station..
The meek shall inherit the Earth… but not the moon.
That's a Patton Oswalt bit; "no, haha, the meek shall inherit the earth, that's right. we're going to Mars. Bye!"
How is it worse compared with workers that are currently employed by the oligarch class? It's not like they don't have people doing menial work for them right now. And automation of menial work is a good thing!
Do you think the current AI automated menial work and left only the fun parts? It seems like the opposite, it took any fun from coding and left the drudgery of debugging code one didn't write intact.
Please read the comment I’m replying to.
Alex Rivera's 2008 movie Sleep Dealer is not without flaws, but it left quite an impression on me. I watched it it after seeing it recommended here in a comments thread on an article about military drone operators, I should probably watch it again with fresh eyes.
EDIT: Jeez, it looks like that's an 11 years old thread. Time does indeed fly.
EDIT 2: The source for the claim is paywalled, but this is how the Cultural impact chapter of the movie's Wikipedia page closes:
> In 2025, Rivera noted that a tech CEO claimed the film had been an inspiration for his company to employ a remote labour force in the Global South in order to operate robots in the Global North, and that the film has been used in pitch decks for various start-ups.
... once again bringing to mind the "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus" meme.
Nah. At least with Uber the driver has self-preservation as an incentive to not just fuck around. What incentive would a freelance nobody have to not do the funniest shit possible inside a stranger's home at least once.
Tele-operation through a video feed(?) inside my home. Yeah that sounds pretty creepy
If I wanted someone taking a look at all the stuff in my home, I'd just pay a cleaner here instead of one behind a desk in what I assume is a low-labor-cost locale. For $50/hr I can have them come in every day for 160 days, and they can manage stairs.
They’re also much less likely to film their activities and upload it to the Internet…
And store it in a large database with eternal retention.
But... but... it's just for training AI!
Paying for someone to clean your house? Thats so last year.
Why an AI company cleaned my New York City apartment for free
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwerjy20kyo
> However, Kilic said Shift was "the most honest platform by far regarding what happens to your data".
Good good
Except these ai fucks are trying to put cameras on all such labor to train future world models and businesses are okay with it since they get paid for doing nothing extra. So yeah they can manage stairs but they might also be recording everything they do
Use an independent cleaner. My cleaning lady is a great cleaner, but she can barely manage her cellphone, so she's not training AIs.
"I won't let a human clean my house because AI companies might be paying them to help train future housework robots" is some nuclear grade paranoia.
Can you imagine all the customer support calls asking why it keeps showing up next to the shower?
Think of 90 y.o. lonely people who can't care less about some company seeing the interior of their house. Surely, it is a risk, but being without any help and assistance.
Most 90 year old lonely people would probably benefit more from an actual human carer than some clanker that can't do stairs, any kind of mobility assistance and can't even make them a cup of tea.
Yeah but that’s more expensive
It'll be about a week before the first reported incident of some operator sending it into bathroom/bedroom while occupied to watch.
... and under an hour before the first phone camera recording hits twitter
I am sure one of these companies will fuck up and do that. But for the most part, that kind of problem is pretty easy to avoid. Any company using computer vision knows that now, and has high standards of operation (usually by contracting with companies that then have that incentive) to stop that from happening.
Correct - they sub it out to a sub who subs it out to a sub who...
Therefore the responsibility is always 5 steps removed
I get that it's funny, but that's almost never true. And the business risk is on the robotics company. That's why I'm saying maybe somewhere it happens once, but it's just like safety and Uber drivers, the scrutiny on the brand causes really good incentives. Uber is way way safer than taxis ever were, or are. Women even drive for Uber - they could never have been safe driving taxis.
> Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance.
This will almost certainly depend on the customer and residence. I don't think subscription pricing will be fair, but it can at least be budgeted for out of pensions and such for the people needing to pay for assistance.
If I'm gonna be an early adopter and give them such valuable training data, they should at least give me stock options
I think they're giving you the robot at half price.
Given how incapable my robotic vacuums and lawnmowers have proven to be, even after several years of iterations, I’d almost prefer if it was all teleoperation and it would hopefully unlock a huge amount of additional tasks it could preform. This would essentially let me hire a human housekeeper at a global vs local wage which is very appealing.
The robot has a two pronged gripper. I wonder what teleoperating that to do complex tasks would be like.
IMO, hard part is likely the lack of haptic feedback, not that it's just a simple gripper. Small and big feedback, so you don't break eggs (not accidentally at least), and also don't pick up a heavy load that makes the robot topple over and give the remote operator motion sickness in the process.
There's a surprising number of labour simulators sold as VR headset games:
https://skyhookgames.com/lawn-mowing-simulator-vr-is-out-now...
https://www.futurlab.co.uk/games/powerwash-simulator-vr
https://gg.deals/game/bartender-vr-simulator/
I’m not sure remote operations needs to be like a VR sim or joystick control of every movement. It might be something more similar to prompts. “Go to front door” “bring in packages” “open packages” “sort trash into pile” <click for item select>”is not trash” “take trash to bin”. Once the house is mapped and a good deal of these routines are learned they can be executed with some fuzzy input to the automation. In my mind this is still full teleoperation
It would be great if the operator could say things like, in above example, “you forgot to close the door, make sure you never leave this door open, even if you have to open it for a task and it’s not explicitly said you should always imply the door needs to be closed after the task. As a general rule, the door should never be open longer than 1 minute longer than it needs to be for task performance” or something similar and this trains the model over time.
I could sweep, mop, vacuum, etc with just my thumb and index finger if needed. But I agree, it’s a limiting design. Probably something they will want to grow beyond eventually. They’ve intentionally handicapped this version, but if they went with a human operated system then maybe they would have seen more potential and given it extra attention. Also, would be interesting if this thing could swap out its “hands” as different jobs may do better with different designs.
It's not a bad business idea, but has dystopian vibes. The human doesn't have to travel to the job site, they don't need to be paid a wage that allows them to exist in an expensive city, and they can watch N screens simultaneously, intervening only when needed. Maybe 1 OOM greater throughput per human-hour. The human teleoperator is also valuable non-public training data, which is part of the learning flywheel. That training data can be sold or kept as a private moat.
How is it any more dystopian than any other offshoring that exist primarily as labor arbitrage?
My in-laws have a full time live in housekeeper that costs $500 per month. And where she’s from, this is a huge opportunity that she went to “maid school” for and many consider excellent compensation. She’s able to send this money home and provides for many family members and has amassed a bit of a real estate empire back home. But, she is absentee. She lives away and rarely gets to visit only about 2-3 weeks a year. So I feel that’s quite sad. They obviously don’t live in the US, because this employment would cost many times more here and probably impossible to even get the proper visas.
Now if this maid was able to live in her village, with her family, and make the same income but perform her tasks through a robot then I think she’d see immediate value in that. So would consumers in America who would love to have housekeepers but can’t afford the local labor rates. Even if you can afford some here, you could get much more for the same budget. A lot of Americans pay this rate for 1-2 cleanings per month, that’s dumb money if you could spend it on something that would sweep up every crumb the day it hit the ground.
> make the same income…
Yeah, that's not the goal of these things.
Your robotic vacuums and lawnmowers are at a much lower price point that can't afford to run an LBM or computer vision to learn how to do a good job. Because those tasks are too specialized, it's unlikely anyone would pay $8000 for one that did a great job, but the technology is totally there.
The key is when the robot can use all the same tools you can, the generalist robot has a value high enough to pay for this technology.
The clothes folding is almost certainly a person.
This sort of menial task would likely be given to someone in a poorer part of the world, who ironically will be some of the first to master the first generation of remotely operated high tech robots.
The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots.
> The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots
If anything, robots will make rich people richer and their position more secure. Once again, you're hoping for a technological solution to non-technological problems
> The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots.
$7,999 a clanker. I can totally imagine hordes of poor people driving around in turret-equipped F-150s packed with robots in evil facemasks.
- Hey, bankster, hands upon the fucking wall!
I’m not sure you understand the comment
Upon re-reading it, yes, I apologize, got it wrong. An army of poor people remotely controlling an army of robots already implanted into rich houses would be fun.
If it were to get to that point, they are already inside your house, paid for by you.
How? If something like that would happen robots would be disabled in 5 minutes.
Like how operating systems get disabled when someone launches a DDOS? :P
Even if robots do get disabled in just 5 minutes, 30 seconds of surprise is plenty for a coordinated decapitation strike (both literally and metaphorically) once enough of the leadership (national or business, take your pick) normalise having these around them, in their homes, preparing things for the next morning while the owners sleep.
Even on a small scale, some random hacker's going to turn one of these into "Mr Stabby the 100% Deniable Assassin". I'm fairly confident this prediction will be ignored until it happens, and moderately confident that when it does some newspaper will find this quotation and use it as their headline.
> 30 seconds of surprise is plenty for a coordinated decapitation strike.
Some guys in a mediterranean country are drooling right now...
In many countries, unfortunately. That's why I'm confident the other half of the comment will happen.
Sadly, those "guys in a mediterranean country" are far from the only ones who like to try and assassinate their problems away.
I feel like this is the sort of thing William Gibson should write...
There's a pretty good 2008 Mexican scifi film "sleep dealer" that covers this topic more or less
>> Sleep Dealer depicts a dystopian future to explore ways in which technology both oppresses and connects migrants.[2] A fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico-US immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer
Nice! Thanks!
... I mean not "nice" as in "all that sounds nice" . I mean "nice" as in "nice dystopia".
Oh 100% haha. Looking at that video on their website I'm pretty sure it's mostly just remote control.
The conditions are ripe for a builder.ai esque scam but with robotics.
Do I care? The job gets done and I don’t have to bother with letting someone physically into my home.
As a parent this seems godsent if it works as advertised just for its overnight reset.
Now if they can’t make the autonomy work to maintain the economics then I’d need an exit clause but other than that, have at it boss.
The risk is that this does not scale, they run out of money, the robot won't work any more, and you payed a lot for nothing.
Yea I would hope for sustainable teleop unit economics and then VC money for autonomy.
But I don’t need high percentage autonomy out of the box was my point.
But you'd get to keep the robot, no?
Not for nothing. None of these companies are going to prioritize difficult physical prevention of you running your own OS, and there are already open source robotics companies where you can run your own stack. A lot of the brain hardware in these things is going to be Nvidia Jetson.
How much does the monthly subscription cost?
$449
Thanks. Then it could definitely be remote controlled often enough.
Every single one of these robot plays are going to try pivot to having someone do you laundry remotely for a dollar a day.
If they ever get the tech down (I doubt it), they will then try move to broader labour replacement.
This is why all the robots need to be humanoid.
Curious why you feel they won’t get the tech down? I think these products are all data plays right now.
Manipulating soft bodies is exceptionally difficult to do with robotics.
moving a soft object from a to b is doable, folding/separating/sorting at any kind of speed is very much an area of active research.
Totally agree but the idea is this gives you a teleoperation environment that is truly on policy and not some artificial lab. The idea is that these robots, like those Amazon stores, are predominantly just controlled by actual humans.
Yeah but if it’s a person seeing inside my home I would rather it be the same person over and over and without cameras.
Teleoperated robots are a better fit for businesses and public spaces
Hey I totally agree I do not want a teleoperator looking into my house, it’s just so deliciously tempting to get in home on policy data. Not sure the reason why they are super interested in home environments vs business or public spaces.
How about sensory feedback loops?
There are at least two companies out there that can fold some laundry in a controlled environment already. At this point it's just a matter of categorizing fabrics and shapes and expanding that knowledge. Two years at the outside until it can fold 80% of your laundry.
Combined with:
> To get it right, we designed and built our own actuators, remote actuation system, and safety systems.
I feel that there might be a degree of ... overconfidence here.
I'm curious what they felt was lacking in current commercial/industrial robotics safety systems.
But the $1 per day is soooo cheap. You can't even run a local LLM for that price.
Latency, unless we get instantaneous comms working there will always be lag.
Annoying when you play games, likely expensive when the robot keeps breaking things.
This is basically a solved problem. Humans have latency, more than your Internet connection. We predict what's going to happen based on the shapes we see. Computer vision and LBMs do the same thing.
I watched the promo video somewhere and when folding the blanket, the video cuts and edits were very suspicious. I doubt it can fold a blanket at all.
They do show it folding shirts, which I'd think are harder than blankets.
Is your doubt caused by blankets being bigger than shirts?
(I didn't see it folding a button-up shirt, only tee-shirts. That's an extra degree of difficult and I do doubt that it can do that.)
Yeah, again the WYSIWYG model of AI: if you see a robot folding a shirt, that robot can fold that shirt. Maybe it can fold another that's very similar, maybe only different in colour, but don't bet your money on it.
A robot folds a shirt and you think it can fold a tee? Not unless it's explicitly trained to fold that one tee, too.
I think blankets are harder simply because of their size. I often have to "whip" the blanket to get the other end to properly fold on itself. I also use a much large space because of the size (often the floor). Could a robot fold a big blanket? Probably? But what is the success rate going to be? If I just have to refold it 50% of the time, is that actually worth it?
"Is Isaac 1 teleoperated? Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks."
Offline and autonomous or never in my house.
Completely offline will literally never happen at least not in any sort of off-the-shelf consumer product maybe in some sort of niche projects down the line
so just a quick counterpoint ---> I played around with qwen 2.5 4B recently locally. An older model and a tiny model.
Tested this model with optimized harness and it was good enough that it was able to complete (sometimes) a full job application flow for given json user data.
All that to say, I think that there is a strong possibility that we will even just with llm tech, develop it enough that local efficient models are entirely sufficient on their own to be able to drive basic robot 'harness'.
But we almost certainly will not be seeing that as the product from the corporations because they desperately want and need that data about you, for the same reason many tv (lcd/etc) companies make more money from 'ads' then from selling the tvs.
I’d disagree with this. As local models and compute improve, I can definitely see something like this becoming doable offline in the next decades. In the meantime, at the very least, I would never use something like this unless I could bring my own API/cloud provider so that my data isn’t being handled by the vendor. Also teleoperation is a huge no go for me.
I get that the voice interface probably uses an LLM but surely the rest of the device isn’t based on LLM tech?
LBM likely - and then that creates rules for a local system to follow.
Believe it or not, I'm actually capable of operating completely offline. So there you have it.
Look, I mean, would you really object to a human cleaner showing up every day and putting away your laundry?
If the answer is "no" then what's the difference if the human cleaner is not physically present but instead teleoperating a robot?
I mean at least the robot won't ever need to use the loo. I'm a bit fastidious like that but I don't like it when strangers sit on my loo.
(Friends too. Why can't we have a robotic potty that follows visitors around? OK, I get it... )
Generally when people have a house cleaner they know who it is and have some form of relationship with them that establishes a baseline of trust. That would not exist here.
This is just initial discomfort. It'll be the same as the incentives that make Uber drivers now way safer than taxis.
Eh, there's no reason why you can't choose your robot's teleoperator(s). Say the company has a page where you can check their profiles and even communicate with them.
And if robot companies were prepared to drop the pretense of robotic autonomy and sell you a by-default teleoperated robot service instead, you could always directly communicate with your robot's teleoperator while they're doing their job. Just talk to the robot, and the teleoperator replies, yes?
It's not really the same unless the human cleaner also wears a gopro to record and archive their entire cleaning session for later review (and potential sale to data brokers when the cleaning company wants more money).
Privacy aside, who wouldn't want their $8,000 cloud device abruptly shut down when Weave Robotics decides to pivot?
So the play here is obvious, use the teleoperation as training data for a more general purpose AI controller. You need that data to make a model in the first place.
What doesn't make sense to me is the cost. Yes, $8000 is probably low for this robot but it's a reasonable price range for something like this. The AI credits though? I know vision LLMs are not cheap, they're not going to run something like Llama3.2vision on every frame. Very curious about the embodied AI architecture that this is going to use, and how it can get cheap enough that it's not going to use $500/month in electricity every month.
Tesla operates vehicles for $100/month. I’m guessing whatever cloud ai this thing needs is less complicated and less money.
Tesla runs its stuff on ~150 watts of local compute that's bundled into the price of the car. The $99/month is just to rent the software.
8k is cheap if laundry is fully offloaded but will a regular consumer spend 8k on a device that is not proven? I guess there is a subset of consumers that this automatically targets/caters to.
Set price too low to be truly rare luxury show off item, but high enough that expendable income is necessary for first movers. Trade in kind by "gifting" to influencer types: the pop science tech nerd ones to legitimize it by scrutinizing current downsides, the effortlessly luxurious ones to establish it as a brand, and a few mom-core ones to seed the aspiration). Develop better versions from the initial data, drop prices a few times a year via holiday sale or via model deprecation, keep current model pricing high. Develop 3rd Gen and introduce "pro" tier. Very tried and true strategy (many step omissions of course) and imo they nailed the price point for initial show off. It's not really affordable for its market but it's also not unaffordable if you consider the costs of what it would replace if it turns out to work!
At what point is it actually cheaper? Laundry isn't that expensive to do yourself, or to outsource if you really don't want to do it yourself.
You’re not replacing the outsourcing it component though, you’re replacing a maid at home doing it for you. In home laundry services are a very different experience since you don’t have to also go pick up and drop off the laundry.
A service like that can be hundreds a month, so pay off period is on the order of years… which could be worth it.
...if the robot lasts years. Or the company, for that matter.
I'd pay $8k tomorrow for a bot that would 100% do my laundry. That means collecting it from the various dirty clothes hampers throughout the house, bringing it to the washer and dryer, operating the washer/dryer, folding and putting clothes on hangers, and putting them back into the dresser and hung up in closets.
For a bot that just automates an in-house laundry service that washes and folds? Not very interesting since it might save maybe 60% of the time, but practically zero percent of the mental overhead.
This seems like a step towards that I suppose. My house isn't configured to make it an option even if it was a fully-baked product, but if these ever get to the point of actually working without remote teleoperation I'd certainly be in the market.
Unless I was physically disabled, elderly, or otherwise unable to do my own laundry, I couldn't even fathom paying a robot (or a maid) to do it. I can maybe understand it if you don't have a clothes washer, and had to wash your clothes manually in the sink or tub or something, but with a washing machine, the machine is already doing 95% of the work! The rest is not difficult or time-consuming. Laundry isn't heavy, and it doesn't take specialized skill or concentration to put them in the machine, start it, or remove them. Not saying your wrong for wanting something like this, but just observing how different people can be with their priorities.
really? you cannot _fathom_ the idea of paying for a robot to do something you, yourself are already capable of doing? someone should tell all these car manufacturers and the like that their cost-benefit analyses of using robots for work humans can do are completely off!
I do have a car, but I wouldn't pay for a robot to pick me up, carry me to the car and then chauffeur me around, unless I was physically disabled.
Buying a machine to do difficult, complex, or strenuous work is one thing. Buying a machine to load and operate the other machine seems... different.
You have a certain number of hours remaining on earth, and that number goes down forever until it reaches zero.
Get on the cross about... doing laundry, I guess? All you want but it's not crazy to want to maximize the amount of time you get to spend with novel, meaningful experience and minimize the amount of time you spend shuffling piles of clothing from one place to another over and over among the dozens of other mundane chores.
If you have the money, why not?
sometimes the mundane chores give me time to decompress and reflect on the novel and meaningful experiences
They're talking about a household chore and your post compares to an industrial production line. It's not like the Ford executives can walk into the laundry and assemble F-150s.
I take your point, but examples like a dishwasher or Roomba are the ones you should be using.
It's way less about the time of doing the thing, and much more about the mental overhead of having to remember to do the thing. And needing to do the thing at very inconvenient times because I forgot to do the thing or lacked motivation when I should have done the thing.
This goes for any recurring chore in my life. I love to garden, but watering plants is hell to me after the novelty wears off. I fixed this by installing an automated irrigation system. I get to do the fun bits mostly on my schedule to wind down when I feel like it (pruning, harvesting, staring at plants) and didn't sign myself up for yet another daily chore to do.
My wife is the opposite. She thrives on "chores" or routine simple items like this. She absolutely loves doing laundry to an absurd degree - kind of a zen moment in the middle of her day she can quickly spend 10 minutes here and there to get done. Same goes for cooking. I enjoy planning and creating elaborate meals I've dialed into "perfection" but take me an entire Saturday to accomplish a few times a year. She loves spending 30 minutes in the kitchen most nights to wind down after work - but really hates "big" projects of any type.
I imagine it has a lot to do with executive function. I enjoy large one-off projects (e.g. designing and installing an over the top totally overkill irrigation system) that are eventually "done" but fall apart on repetitive simple things that never end and just reset to be done X hours all over again. I like to have my "mental slate" clean when I wake up for the day, and I find I accomplish far more when I can configure my life in such a way.
As such, this robot as-is would be somewhat useless to me as I'd have to remember to hang up the clothes or walk them up the stairs to put away or whatever even with it. I'd get very little advantage for the spend.
We have many kids and well, laundry is omnipresent. I would absolutely pay multiples of this to make the problem go away.
> but with a washing machine, the machine is already doing 95% of the work!
Not sure how literal you were here or if it's more a feeling thing to you: My washing machine takes 1-2 hours per run. I don't believe you (or anyone else) can do all other attached work in 5 Minutes, or anywhere close to it.
You're defining work as a function only of time, but effort should also be calculated in.
If you didn't have a washing machine, it would probably take more than 2 hours, and definitely take far more effort.
The washing machine is the one that needs redesign to incorporate folding.
We can't even get to a washing machine that's also the dryer though. If it seems hard to get people to adopt even that new technology, then clothes folding is never gonna happen.
That is becouse those wash and drying machines are bad at drying the cloths.
> machine is already doing 95% of the work!
See, I want 100% of the work to be done.
I doubt it will ever be cheaper than doing it yourself, like most things in life. The market is for people unable or unwilling to do it themselves.
Outsourcing can be difficult and expensive in many regions. The lack of an actual human might even be considered a benefit in some cases, such as nursing homes (although you have to weigh the benefits of human contact with the benefits of fewer humans spreading plagues).
The world of computer vision is much bigger than multimodal LLMs. You'd run an ensemble of specialized models for 3d mapping, object classification, path validation, and so on. On a raspberry pi 5 8gb you can run what you need to self drive an RC car on an obstacle track at 10 FPS.
Today, a lot of it is just integrated VLAs. End to end backprop covers a multitude of sins - a single integrated model stack in cross-attention beats "an ensemble of specialized models".
> So the play here is obvious, use the teleoperation as training data for a more general purpose AI controller.
Strong disagree: the play here is to use teleoperation, claim it's AI, make a shit-ton of money and cash out before the house of cards come tumbling down.
The cost is really tough to pin down, yeah.
The way one of their employees told me it to me as like a dishwasher.
Of course the dishwasher should be more expensive. When you add up the hours in labor saved and multiply by the hourly median wage, you get something in the $50k to $100k range.
But it's essentially just a sprinkler.
Ain't no one going to to pay the cost of a new BMW for a dishwasher.
Same thing here for the laundro-bots. Their competition isn't against the time saved for a person to do it themselves. The competition is a maid that does your whole house for $70.
It may actually be cheaper to have the robot remotely operated all the time from some low cost country...
> Of course the dishwasher should be more expensive. When you add up the hours in labor saved and multiply by the hourly median wage, you get something in the $50k to $100k range.
Except most dishwashers aren't competing against people washing dishes by hand and making the hourly median wage, they're competing against other dishwashers
>> Very curious about the embodied AI architecture that this is going to use, and how it can get cheap enough that it's not going to use $500/month in electricity every month.
In practice most of the costs would be the teleoperation costs rather than AI inference.
While I find robots cool they just don't literally "fit" in an average flat or house I lived in majority of my life. In order to squeeze one more member into your average household the lil thing needs to justify refurbishing the entire place so it can actually operate there without being a nuisance. Reminds of how my relative spent quite a bit of time making sure an old house being renovated was flat enough so automatic vacuum cleaner could traverse room to room without getting stuck. A humanoid robot is larger still. I can see them being adopted by businesses first though.
It doesn't need to have a sleeping surface or stay sprawled out when it isn't in use. It could bunch up into a little ball and fit in the corner of your ceiling. And it doesn't need to be the size of an adult to do most household stuff, some of the unitree ones are really short in stature, a foldable step stool for reaching upper cabinets or changing lightbulbs is probably enough.
A bigger issue is whether it can really be as safe, not trip over wires, throw the baby in the trashcan, start a fire trying to make a cup of coffee and that kind of thing. Beyond accidents, lots of companies are talking about hooking these up to LLMs for planning that have horror movies in their training sets.
The ones with wheels are going to trip over everything. The moment a company has enough functional use cases for one of these that it's not limited to one floor of your house, that version will be bipedal and not trip.
People who have the disposable income to buy $8,000 personal robotic assistants or $20,000 1X Neo are a lot more likely to live in larger spaces. I've got about 1,000 sqft per occupant in my home. Plenty of room for a C-3PO or Johnny 5.
Can Johnny 5 get between the sofa and coffee table without needing to move furniture?
> Handles loaded hampers
What does it mean "handles"? It doesn't say it puts on a wash, but that's what I'd want. I can only assume they're vague because it doesn't do anything useful.
> Makes beds
A robot the height of a child makes a double bed with sheet, duvet, and pillows? I highly doubt it could reach.
> Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks.
That's a lot of words to say "a person will drive it around your home". What sort of insurance do they have for that person breaking something in your home? What audit trail do they have for the operators?
>What sort of insurance do they have for that person breaking something in your home?
Probably just make the user accept a license agreement saying they accept the risk? I suspect most people would accept the risk something might get broken if it means they no longer need to clean their house.
Not if the broken thing is a pet or toddler. And the amount of actual cleaning this thing appears to do is tiny.
What if it breaks something and you still need to clean your house? This thing does not look like it's going to much of anything successfully.
I'm not defending anything about this, but it does have a telescoping torso so it can get to 'human height' when needed.
Down under "What does it do" it says:
> Depending on the home in question, Isaac 1 may be able to help with even more within each feature area (such as loading and unloading clothes from washer/dryer machines)
So evidently that isn't included in Laundry flow. Maybe "handles" just means picking up the hamper and moving it to the washing machine? I wonder if it requires a specific hamper for this to work.
Honestly this thing looks pretty useless.
I find it very suspicious that the laundry folding segment of the video has awkward cuts of the interesting parts. Makes me question if it is actually capable of doing that
There are 2 complete folds in the Isaac 0 video around 0:40, but speeded up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KhImSR8GuCE
The about page claims 1000+ lbs of laundry folded every week.
That's fine. Like a robot lawnmower - if it does it every day, it doesn't need to be as fast as a person.
I would be happy if it could put my clothes on hangers without teleoperation.
Seems to suffer from the dalek problem.
My laundry is upstairs and my washer is downstairs.
Also doesn’t seem to be able to start washer/dryer and transfer loads.
Yup, not mentioning weight is problematic. I also want to understand pet safety.
-Phone notification-
Your chinchilla had finished the wash cycle.
I have a cat who pushed the Roomba out the door where an elk smushed it, turns on the gas fireplace when I’m out of town because he’s an environmental terrorist and stopped shitting in his box when I just put a litter robot in his room. I assume the Dalek would meet some impossible-to-predict horribly fate before the 17-year old cat does.
-Phone notification- Your chinchilla rug had finished the wash cycle
I don't have a rug... oh wait...
Yeah this piece of marketing got me:
> Made to fit in every home, including yours.
Unless that home has stairs
I have a startup idea: I will make the robot that ferries your laundry robot up and down the stairs.
You could call it the El-e-vator!
Not a bad idea, just a cog track that the robot grabs onto. I'd install one.
I have a stairlift to sell you.
A coming update will enable grappling hook operation
Not even stairs, looks like one step will defeat this $8000 robot.
Yeah I was thinking exactly this. Also I don't think it can reach my dryer.
I am happy this kind of thing is being worked on, I just don't think this is gonna be it - they really talk around what it does but "folding clothes" isn't enough. $8k to handle a complete laundry cycle (including ironing) might be interesting.
"Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks."
I'll pass lol
From the looks of it, you're gonna need one robot per floor. On the one hand, it's refreshing seeing a robot that's not a creepy humanoid, on the other, how is it gonna deal with steps and stairs ?
That’s what they said about the Daleks, who still managed to suppress all other species and become supreme rulers of the universe.
This seems to be a redux of the 1x play (which was panned across the internet after the WSJ review).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so
The hardware for these machines have been capable of household tasks for atleast 2 decades.
Here's PR1 cleaning up a room,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7JH3UWO6I0
The issue is not even teleop as a product. The issue none of these companies talk about is one of state-reset. Even a teleop-ed robot comes nowhere near the dexterity of a human - as the Joanna Stern review of 1x shows: 10 mins to load a dishwasher, 5 mins to get a glass of water, body coming the way of a fridge door, irrecoverable breakdowns every 30 mins...
Consider what happens if it drops some glassware or spills liquids on a carpet in addition (or worse does something stupid with the kitchen appliances). The teleop guy in Phillipines or India can't hop on a plane to fix this.
This 'environment reset' problem is at the core of RL - there are no solutions for this yet, only workarounds.
>> This seems to be a redux of the 1x play (which was panned across the internet after the WSJ review).
For a moment I thought it was the same company.
>> This 'environment reset' problem is at the core of RL - there are no solutions for this yet, only workarounds.
That, and generalisation. A year or so back Aloha made huge waves but teleoperation doesn't solve the fundamental limitation of RL, that you have to train anew for every new environment or task.
They’ve had two of the Isaac 0 bots at the laundromat down the street from me for months. I’ve been impressed watching them evolve.
are you allowed to video them to see whether they can actually do a good job?
Man the design of this thing! Looks like they raided an old Nintendo warehouse and found a moss-covered Robb!
That might sound like a criticism to some, but rest assured it's meant as praise!
Who wouldn't want a moss-covered Robb cleaning their house?
looks like someone increased the border-radius on Jonny 5
When comes to lower part it’s always bipedal (hard to balance) or wheels (low capabilities). Why no one makes 4-6 legs, insect like? That seems like an easier problem to solve while gives much better mobility.
Entomophobia/arachnophobia is far too common for giant bug-like robots in folks' bedrooms.
A couple hundred legs would be optimal.
They make robot dogs, e.g. famously Boston Dynamics but many others as well. And 6 is probably overkill for price/performance increase incremental to 4. Wheels are still much more practical and you can use them as feet in hybrid designs to be able to step over obstacles but still more agile than comparable bi/quadrupeds
Going from 2 to 4 legs doubles the amount of actuators required and substantially increases power consumption since you must move more mass, going to 6 compounds the problem further. In a future where we have more dense power storage and better (and cheaper!) motors, you probably will see robots with more legs. But for now, the most efficient solutions are bipedal.
Especially because this thing is already $8k, I imagine they have already done some substantial price optimization.
Real question: what about 3 legs? Is tripedal locomotion a viable compromise?
Real answer: how many animals can you think of with three legs?
Ah, so it’s impossible to make a robot unless it looks like an animal
Kangooroos?
There are millions or billions of quadrupeds surviving on 3 legs every day. 4 legs is evolutionarily superior to 3 but 3 gets the job done, especially if you don't have to worry about agility or repair.
This one right here
How many animals have wheels? And yet wheels are a pretty practical choice for a lot of things.
If the robot has two legs with wheels at the ends it could combine speed and flexibility. Adding a third leg for additional stability when the robot needs it might be great. But the third leg would probably need to be between the first two and I don't think humans are mature enough to have that.
There is likely no benefit over 2 legs if you need to step over things. And if you don't, wheels are just fine. Maybe stairs changes this.
It's been done, I don't really know how the efficiency compares but I'm sure there's some research out there on it. The main issue I see though is that the advantage you get with 4+ legs is stability at slow speed - you can be stable on three legs while moving one, which makes precise movement easier.
With three legs, as soon as you pick one up you will start to fall over, so you either need legs with enough freedom of movement to shift the center of mass of the robot back to offset the lack of support, or some other way to shift the center of mass.
You have to balance with two legs, as well, but there isn't a transition from "stable" to "balancing" with every step - you're always actively balancing - which makes movement easier to plan.
Overall I suspect that tripedal locomotion isn't really any more efficient than bipedal movement, and it might even be less stable.
Just one example: https://spectrum.ieee.org/martian-inspired-tripod-walking-ro...
Conversely one leg would be cheaper and lighter. I look forward to welcoming our hopping robot overlords!
It's been done! https://spectrum.ieee.org/jumping-robot-salto1p
I agree on the rest but don't see why it would be heavier. If you have more feet standing at any particular moment the load would be more distributed, i.e. movement should be easier with more legs (depending on leg weight of course).
You're confusing (pressure on the ground / surface area) with overall weight (the sum of all pressure on the ground). Having more legs is heavier simply because now you have additional struts and motors that you didn't before, those items are linear with the number of legs, and the total weight is weight_of_leg x num_legs.
I wonder how much of it is training data. We can very easily get training data of 'human tasks' because humans can wear tracking suits, and those suits track bipedal movement. Anything we train off that isn't bipedal (ie dogs) don't do human tasks, don't hold anything, so a different set of requirements.
How about a centaur? - https://www.satyress.com/
Wheels in a different configuration solve the stairs problem. https://www.sacktrucks.co.uk/stair-climber-trucks/
wheels are so much simpler that it seems much easier and more cost efficient to solve the "transporting a wheeled robot up the stairs problem" than it does to go fully bipedal.
> with teleoperation assistance
Privacy nightmare. Bunch of random, low-paid operators looking around inside my home. No thanks!
Not just looking, this robot has write access to your house too
Is that really a concern? Pretty much any robovac nowadays has a camera and a wireless connection to the cloud and nobody seems to care.
The difference is between the possibility someone might look and the guarantee that they are looking.
Just because a large percentage of the population either lacks the ability to understand why it's bad to have a livestream of your home being sent to China or simply doesn't care doesn't mean it's not a problem.
Second, for robot vacuums you can flash them with Valetudo, a completely local control interface. The robots even run a custom DNS server that prevents them from ever phoning home.
> nobody seems to care.
I don't care if nobody else cares, but I care. If someone crafted a home/garden robot that is fully autonomous using local AI or something like that then I'd be interested.
I find the operator point of view equally horrifying.
Likely, they will run an OCR scan to blur any text seen through the cameras. Also likely, they would run a vision model classifying identifiable information: people walking past, hanged photos or even paintings, TV screens, maybe even the view outside the window? For safety purposes, I imagine it's also worth identifying handheld tools such as knives, bats, etc., all done so the operator risks are minimized.
Fair enough, and I'm not arguing against that, there's just something distasteful about the operator having to walk around in a largely obscured, muted camera feed, looking for traces of underwear scattered around the house.
It is not really much different than paying for cleaning, the cleaning person also sees inside of house.
they don't record everything and store it on a company's servers somewhere where it is used for who knows what.
as an aside, a human that I hire can do a much wider range of tasks than a robot PLUS it is income for a family.
> The company says the robot completes Laundry Flow and Daily Reset tasks autonomously by default, but uses teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion.
Does that mean some random human looking at my dirty laundry in the middle of my home, the most intimate place in existence for me? No thank you.
Understandable reaction. That being said, thousands of people already pay for the privilege of inviting an actual human into their home every week to clean. For those people, that doesn’t seem likely to be a hurdle.
Personally, I’d probably be willing to stomach a teleoperator but what I would not be comfortable with is the company retaining images, video, and other telemetry from my condo on their servers for who knows how long.
That invited stranger is probably not recording footage that will be stored for all time. There were leaks about how Tesla employees were sharing images/videos of customers.
So much more of it, also strangers come and go, they are there, they knock and shout before entering a room where you might be changing clothes or taking shower. They will not only get leaked and abused internally, it will be also sold. They will also inevitable get hacked (storage or remote access), operators will be maybe even bribed for remote access to certain users, government will subpoena for remote access credentials and videos (assuming they are not going to be given a direct back door (similar to what Google and Meta did in the last). Current landscape user privacy in technology is a fucking mess, unless something technically designed (E2E, no remote access etc) to be private it’ll get abused and will be used against you. As someone who grew up and made a life out of technology I truly hate where we are with it and heavy capitalist and anti-consumer design of almost all new products.
Yea but people invite actual humans into their homes who have names, faces, reputations, relationships, and some degree of social accountability.
If I hire someone to come into my home I can meet them, decide whether I trust them, build familiarity over time, and develop some form of reciprocity. They know whose home they’re entering, and I know who they are.
That feels very different from an anonymous person on the other side of a teleoperated robot... who may be one of many interchangeable operators, switching in and out on some unknown schedule, with no meaningful relationship to me.
Maybe I’m just the wrong audience for this. Because no way am I comfortable with anonymous strangers looking around inside my home.
Yes but I trust the middle aged lady trying to make an honest living than what will likely be an Actually Indian from halfway across the world peeking into my home in a room full of other Indian's gossiping about the customers standards of living. If you don't care that Mr. Joy likes to teleoperate the bot especially while the wife and teenage daughter are active around the house then go for it.
Honestly the Indian worker teleoperating the robot is probably also just a middle aged lady trying to make an honest living.
So much of housing in my area is high density now taking the form of row housing with multiple levels. Other homes have laundry in the basement, bedrooms on a second level. Sadly Isaac isn't going to be as useful if you have stairs.
/me gets tempted then looks at his Roomba gathering dust, on itself, for years now.
It's great in theory. I hate chores... but those things don't work. They work-ish in some ideal cases but a house, even a sorted one, is a mess. You have cables, clothes on the floor, etc.
Cleaning up is a menial task but it's not a trivial one, both mechanically and cognitively speaking.
It won't work.
Bearing in mind even competent human cleaners often do a mediocre job tidying up I cannot possibly see how this robot could even begin to be useful.
It would work, if they could simplify the problem space. Install rails on the ceiling and pic and place from there..
True, basic barely noticeable adjustments for a normal home.
Better than- ups - i wrapped another cord around my tracks- and ripped a appliance +socket from the wall.. or spend thousands making my home robot-ready.
Can this go up and down stairs? If I want my home tidied up, I want the whole home done not just one floor.
For 100 USD I can get a Roomba or Roborock for one floor and because that is so cheap I don’t mind this limitation. But for 8-10k USD I would expect this very common household feature to be solved.
It's inevitable that someone will build a good robot to do these mundane chores. But is that a good thing? I vacuum every night and during that I get some great thinking done. If I had a robot vacuum, I can said with certainty I would make good use of that time.
>> Laundry and tidying are valuable because they recur, generate messy edge cases and create training data. They are also privacy-sensitive and physically variable in ways that robot demos tend to hide.
It's the WISYWYG model of AI: when you watch a video of a (usually humanoid) robot folding laundry, tying shoelaces, hanging shirts etc, it's hard to appreciate the specificity of the observed performance. Which is extreme: a robot folding a t-shirt can only fold that one t-shirt in the video unless it's been explicitly trained to fold... another one. You need to train for every single t-shirt, every single shoe whose laces you want to tie up etc [1].
It's hard to believe because we expect a humanoid that can fold one t-shirt to be able to fold any t-shirt and usually also many if not all other kinds of clothing. But that's not how it works with robots, or in any case their AI. Hence the need to teleoperate.
Btw, no, Transformers have not yet revolutionised the field [2].
As to "fake it 'till you [have enough data to train a super-capable AI and] make it" that's the same bet made by Tesla and its autopilot, and there's still not enough data for a safe/ level-4/5 self-driving car, despite all the cars that Tesla has sold. Nor, dear reader, are Waymo robotaxis level 5 yet (despite them being apparently much safe than anyone else's SDCs).
>> Beds, made. Pillows, blankets, kids' and pets' toys, shoes, back where they belong.
No way modern AI can figure out where "kids' and pets' toys, shoes" belong. As if there's such a thing anyway.
>> With Laundry Flow, Isaac 1 goes beyond folding, finding and picking up dirty clothes and handling loaded hampers.
I put my dirty laundry in a plastic bug under a kitchen cupboard.
Will Isaac 1 be able to deal with it?
:angel eyes:
___________________
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/02/a-revolution-i...
Check out the bit where the reporter asks "If I gave it my shoe (...) would it totally fail?".
[2] Mac Schwager: How General are Generalist Robot Policies?
https://youtu.be/C4NQNeSO2vs?si=7J3Is_WyZc3L0lQk
And so it begun..
Jokes aside does anybody else notice the eerie similarities with gray aliens?
It reminded me of ET
I don't think this or the other competitor announced last year will ever ship, or if they do, they'll quickly go out of business. There's no real product there.
Seems like something for people with more money than sense. If you could afford to drop money on this, odds on you can get a weekly maid who will do it for a fraction of the price.
Watching the videos, they have the cleanest kids in that house. The ability to move pillows 4 inches is just blowing my mind.
The practicalities of it work out though. The same way the car replaced the horse and carriage, not having to deal with those messy biologics, means that it becomes a reliable dependable thing in a way that a human maid, with a human life outside of work, just simply isn't, no matter how hard the maid tries.
Put a maid's uniform on it and looks almost like Rosey for the Jetsons (1962): https://thejetsons.fandom.com/wiki/Rosey
Now honest question: How is all of that Daily Reset and Laundry stuff going to work if you have stairs and multiple floors?
So here's the thing: Laundry isn't really the chore that eats up my time. It takes like a minute or two to move clothes from the basket to the machine, and seconds to turn it on. Same with moving them to the dryer afterwards.
Same with easy tidying up.
What takes time, however, is cleaning and making food.
Let me blow your mind. The reason laundry doesn't take much of your time is because we built a robot to do it for you and it already handles 99.99% of the job and it costs a couple hundred bucks and it's called a washing machine. This machine costs $8000 and is promising to solve the other 0.01% of the time spent on this job, and it's promising to solve 0.01% of that 0.01%.
Can it vacuum for me? Change the bedding? Can I put it to work in a blacksmith shop? Can it live outside and have the task of picking up leaves from the garden one by one until it finally breaks and causes The Android Uprising?
Top comments discuss the price, the design, the tech, which is what I expect on HN of course.
I do question: why? $8000 to pick up the laundry and fold clothes. Good god, is this what innovation and technology aspires to achieve in 2026?
At that price point, and for the limited value it delivers...I think this is aimed squarely at the upper middle-class people. Those that are rich enough to not feel any economic stress from dropping $8k at a two-trick pony, but not rich enough to have a full-time domestic cleaner. Probably also aimed at the tech conscious people.
Whats doable with todays technology is to give people walking robots[1] and instantly enable last mine connectivity to all metro/train/bus transit.
Bikes (and e-scooters, one wheels) are a decent solution, but you can't take them in most metros or buses. 2nd/3rd world infrastructure is pothole ridden, not even ready for bikes. Walking can take you everywhere.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G3oP9T5LQ64
For some reason, reminds me of Cassandra: https://www.netflix.com/title/81621534. Maybe it's the gripping fingers or the way it rolls around the house in the demo video..
For the people complaining about human operators: Stop bitching! It will be just like us vibe-coding on multi monitors. This is the future of work.
$8000 up front + $100 a month
Assuming it lasts maybe 4 years that’s $61 a week.
So you could just hire a human cleaner to come once a week and have them do a way better job.
Or if you prefer to compare to the subscription price of $450 a month you can now have your human cleaner come twice a week
Except this is a daily/nightly service?
Atleast in my home, it’s the daily cleanup that’s operationally grating with babies and toddlers. The weekly/monthly deep cleans are downright fun.
Wanna come do my monthly deep clean?
I'm pretty certain that if these were actually ready there'd be commercial uses of them first, where they see a lot more use and thus generate a lot more value than any household has laundry.
Robot operated laundry on a cruise ship or something.
Robots are used extensively for commercial purposes, though.
Yeah, but not for this or similar tasks... (unless I'm out of date?)
Working with fabric is notoriously difficult. Doubly so when we're talking random unknown pieces of fabric already sewed together by some third party and not simple rolls of it that need to be transformed in known ways into clothing.
I think they mean something like at laundromats. Or those large commercial laundry services should be using them behind the scenes.
The goal at this stage is largely training data collection so it can reach widescale use. Just like self driving variations in multiple different cities, the data needed for AI robotics is broad with a million niche usecases, so it makes sense it's not strictly commercial.
They need visual recording of tele-operated robots (or humans with headset cameras) doing normal household stuff like folding laundry in real environments so it can be fully automated. Which is what funds a lot of this stuff since that training data is a goldmine right now if a company can collect enough of it.
I think that is backwards. If you are replacing full time staff you need a system that works just as fast for the same or less money. For home use, you don't care if it takes 3 hours to make your bed or just stops for a while when waiting for a teleoperator to become available.
> For home use, you don't care if it takes 3 hours to make your bed or just stops for a while when waiting for a teleoperator to become available.
But why would you pay thousands and store a clunky machine in your home for that? Either you don't care about the bed being made or not -- in which case just don't, its not essential -- or you'd have it made already in 30-60 seconds when you got up before you could even get the thing turned on.
Folding laundry is the same thing. It says 30-90 minutes, I assume for one wash load? A human couldn't possibly take more than 30 minutes. And a human with a folding board could do it in 5-10. So unless you do not care about laundry at all, it would drive you crazy to watch that machine blocking your hallway for over an hour slowly folding a single load.
Alternatively, a wash/dry/fold service will deliver them to your door not just folded, but neatly packed in dustproof bags. (This is a major life hack when packing for a trip btw.)
The product specs are pretty light on details. Weight? Speed? Capabilities? How loud is it?
This thing looks like they should package in a vacuum / floor washer into its base and something to empty/replenish it into that large base unit it docks with.
At $450/month, that's the same hourly rate as India's Urban Company / Snabbit / Pronto instant help. So it's price-competitive even in India.
Those folding clothes clips are the best:
- The robot dragging one corner over itself into a sloppy mess. - Cut. - It’s perfectly folded.
Somehow it makes me irrationally angry that it is moving so slow, despite knowing it is trying its best.
Hopefully they can pull this off. Aged care is already a problem in many countries, and getting worse with an aging population and lack of workers such as cleaners. Even just laundry could keep people living in their own homes for a few extra years.
I think the first to use such home robots will have is people who can do the tasks but simply don't want to be bothered.
The aged, infirm and disabled are going to need real people for company and to deal with any crises the infirm might have. And since the real people will be there and paid for anyway, the state is unlikely to pay for robots as a quality of life improvement (they'd pay for them if they removed the caregiver but that complete removal will science fiction for a while).
As an example, I work taking care of a partly paralyzed man. He's tried an exoskeleton, believes it would help him a lot but can't afford the many thousands of dollars it would cost. The state pays for 18-hours/day care which is tens of thousands of dollars a month but they have to pay that.
There you go, all your privacy gone right in the hands of these companies!
Could work well in vacation rentals where items in the house are well defined with very specific put back places.
Thank goodness! That pillow has been in the wrong place on my sofa for weeks and I didn't know what to do!
You guys fold laundry?
The last time I saw one of these things being promoted I found out all of the "demos" on YouTube had some dude sitting in a closest with a VR headset controlling the whole thing.
So that laundry task is not possible due to wheels at least in my house. You need to Cary this guy everywhere lol
Are these the same guys that were trashing airbnbs testing the robots?
No, that was The Bot Company [1][2].
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/28/sf-startup-secretly-testin...
[2] https://www.bot.co/
I'll buy a robot that can put fitted sheets and fold every piece of laundry no matter how contorted/inside-out it is. Till then, they're just gimmicks. Also, it should have legs.
This is another industry that seems to me a lot like the AI glasses. It's that sweet spot of being extremely difficult to make work, whilst simultaneously offering almost nothing of value.
It's actually striking that what they're promising it can do is almost nothing, and that it still won't be able to do what they claim. "Folds and puts clothes away" - ok, can I see any video of it taking clothes out of a washing machine (it can't), folding them, identifying where the clothes should go and then putting them there, and for example, opening a wardrobe and putting the clothes into the right place - possibly underneath other stuff that's already in there.
Not a single frame showing the robot grabs anything.
Cut scene aaaand folded! It's like magic.
Can't wait to see the first horror movies about home robots
Doesn’t seem to handle stairs. This assumes a large 1 story house?
That is one of the creepiest things I've seen in a while! And the first time something akin to uncanny valley has gotten me. The way it slowly raises out of its dock. The arms just hanging there in the photo at the bottom. The weirdly broad 'smile' it seems to have (it's just the lip of the head I think, but it looks like a very creepy smile to me). Its slow methodical movements. The way it wheeled past that doorway. Eurghh. Is it just me? I feel like I could never relax with this in my home. Like I'll turn around to find it inches away from me, watching.
I was actually waiting for it to pull out a butcher knife and reveal the landing page is actually a promo for a techno-horror film.
I wonder how this thing would hold up against a dog
Number five is alive!
This looks like something from 80s sci-fi and far behind what Unitree has.
"Constantly improving"
This means "constant forced software updates with the potential to brick the product." Just like Nest.
Also likely: Inadequate security so your robot becomes a node in a residential VPN or a botnet. Or some hacker takes over your robot to scope out the interior of your house and sells that info to burglars on the darknet. Or to ICE.
And you know what cannot be improved with software? Sensors. Like the kind in its fingertips that almost certainly are not good enough to allow it to fold laundry reliably.
Soooo close, but I have a 4 floor house. Talk to me when it does stairs.
Feels like they cloned the vacuum cleaner Roborock Saros Z70, and attached the arms to a pole instead of the base.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x9TdqrvDHWY
Especially the arm clamp is the same shape, the actions are practically the same (take object and put in basket, teleoperation with live camera).
The type of thing you have lot of fun for 5 minutes.
Cheaper Unitree robots that starts at 4,900 USD are impressive in comparison.
Quite ridiculous. For 449 USD / month couldn't you just hire someone to clean your whole place and even sort your clothes, empty the trash, etc ?
> a Weave specialist
Lol. Folding engineer.
You can, but who are you to stop people that don't trust a human to not steal their shit so would rather have a remote controlled robot do it though?
It's tricky but I'm betting it's possible to teleoperate sending all their jewelry to the philippines.
$450 USD / month to have a human turn up every day? $15 USD per day, including weekends? Around here you might just about get the minimum of 1 hour/day for 10 times that.
This will be life changing for the elderly and disabled if they can pull it off. If you have socialized care, the government would even probably pay since it will be cheaper than aged care facilities.
Why does the human have to turn up every day? You're the one who added that requirement. That's on you.
The moment you reduce it down to 10 visits per month you're already at $45 per visit.
Let's say 6 visits to different people per day and since there are 21 working days per month on average that is 21/10*6*$450 = $5785 or $70k in revenue per year.
You can't tell me that this wouldn't pay for an employee that doesn't require office space. Maybe $450 per month is too cheap and it has to be raised slightly, but this would pay for an entry level cleaner even in San Francisco.
HN seems really, really negative this week for some reason (it maybe it's just me).
This seems cool, even if it's really just teleoperated.
Selling tele-operated robots in the hopes you get AI valuation is borderline scam IMO.
This is hiring a human worker with extra steps, worse cost benefit and in a dehumanising manner.
Their plan is surely to collect huge amounts of training data and replace the human workers.
That’s how we ended up where we are. Which is effectively trading privacy to convince and cool everyday. Now the new generation doesn’t even understand what they are selling.
I get what you are saying but unless we call it what it is (which is disgusting) we will just keep getting more of it, and will normalize this bullshit. (Intrusive products are already normalized but maybe we can slow the escalation of their intrusiveness).
Even finding a non cloud-video photo uploading robot vacuum is a challenge if not impossible. Because we accept this bullshit we ended with no alternative privacy oriented design and solutions in the market. Unfortunately people don’t pay enough of a premium for real privacy.
It's not out of some anti-AI ideology. I use LLMs daily. I just don't understand why we need to pay $8,000 for a robot that does exactly two tasks, takes up space in the house, uses power, and needs updates and repairs.
At $15/hr, $8000 is 533 hours. So you are only breaking even if you get more than 22 full days of human folding labor (not the actual, slower time it takes the robot) during the useful life of the machine (probably 2-3yr max since it relies on backend supervision like a waymo). ChatGPT estimates that a human could fold about 27,000 shirts over 533 work hours.
It looks terribly depressed, lonely and sad.
at least we have that in common
"The first 10 million [pounds of laundry] were the worst, after that everything went downhill"
- Marvin the household laundry bot
RadioShack where are you, you should be selling these.
So you will have low-paid Africans from 3rd world countries tele-operating a robots in rich peoples houses doing chores?
Exactly. With special safeguards to prevent them from "exfiltrating" any of your property or information with the help of accomplices on the ground, online services, or other clever hacks.
Yes, that's the path we're on. It may start with poor eastern Europeans, then gradually move to Africans who tele-operate on eastern European homes.
[flagged]
the way it peeks over the couch in the landing page video :'D
That reminds me of this 90's very very NSFF ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc0BUPRTX2Q
* Not safe for feminists
Is there an add on / subscription / higher tier where it joins in?
Better than local servants doing chores.
Why is that better?
Slavery is better when you don't have to think about it, I suppose.
It's not slavery when you get paid for it and can quit
Slaves generally get room and board, and always have the opportunity to quit (although the other option is often death, so slavery is preferable.)
I'm not trying to be facetious, I'm trying to tell you that your criteria are not meaningful, and you're pretending like they're obvious. It's why many US slaves moved directly from slavery into sharecropping for the same masters. The only thing that changed was the paperwork. Now they were renters, who could quit (with no assets and no means to feed themselves.)
I once ham-fistedly tried to allude to a similar concept. That slaves were at least "kept" while today's wage slaves have more responsibility, and de facto less freedom due to 'The Matrix' that is our financial and legal system that benefits so few.
We have lords of land. A monetary system based mostly on trickery hidden behind boring math that inexorably erodes the purchasing power of what we receive as compensation for our finite time alive.
So let's just jump to the interesting bit: how do we fix it? Got any ideas?
The solution has always and will always be to respect the laws of thermodynamics and rising entry.
Demurrage [0]
Consider the following: You have a zero lower bound constraint on the interest rate in your economy. The real interest rate falls below zero. What happens? Deflation. Deflation ends up forcing the real interest rate into the positive range even when the nominal equilibrium interest rate would be negative to reach a real interest rate of zero. So in the deflation case, equilibrium simply doesn't happen.
If equilibrium is not possible below zero, then the currency must be operated in the positive interest range. Hence you need eternal inflation to force the interest rates back into positive nominal territory. Since positive nominal interest is still a net inflow of money from consumers (interest is priced into consumer prices) to money holders, the end result is that money flows to those who already have money and way from those who need to fulfill their basic thermodynamic maintenance even in the case where the real interest rate is 0%. Turns out lying about thermodynamics doesn't work in the end, so you get the worst of both worlds: inflation and inequality.
Another way to conceptualize it is that cash is a guaranteed 0% bond and the real interest rate can be negative due to thermodynamics. The government is obligated to pay the difference between the 0% interest rate on money and the real interest rate in the physical economy. It's like the savings that should normally be effected by thermodynamics turn out to be financial garbage and the government obligated itself to buy off the garbage. Of course what happens is that more people produce financial garbage in response to the government's minimum price floor. Eternally rising government debt is a foregone conclusion and it has nothing to do with political incompetence (ok not introducing demurrage or abolishing the ZLB is a form of incompetence, but its a binary matter of doing it).
If you want debt loads to shrink, then borrowers need a form of leverage to reduce the durations of debts. If the contract says the debt must grow over time and holders of money have no duration restriction on their holdings then you would have to be stupid to not expect this output. Note again, its the duration of the positive balances being decoupled from their negative counterpart. The interest payments are just a side effect that accelerates the problem.
Oh and those who obsess over non-money financial assets: Money is a utility and a monopoly. Capital markets have various types/forms of formal agreements based on contracts. People with money would never accept conditions that are worse than the conditions on money, so in the end the capital contracts are just mirroring properties of the money that the original investor is handing over. Debt contracts have fixed terms and payment schedules and liquidation preference/rights upon bankruptcy, whereas most investments do not have that, which is why a risk premium is added on top. An economy without ZLB money but conventional capital market contracts are mostly be fine since thermodynamics/reality are reflected through failure of the investment.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_currency
A sustained societal and legal system designed to curtail the rights of blacks is similar to slavery. Having a job is not.
It's just wage slavery then :-).
You can do it OR you can starve. That's the beauty of freedom of choice under capitalism.
AI = Actually Indenturedservantsfromthirdworldcountries
Can it climb stairs?
This looks vaguely interesting, but not with remote brains. Make this local-only and I might bite.
I do not want a giant chunk of metal and sensors controlled by some outside entity roaming around my home freely.
"... teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion."
NOPE. Close tab. If this does not work without an internet connection then it's DOA. I should only have to connect it for software updates. Other than that, the bot is offline, period.
No? Think of a malicious actor hacking into one of these things and using your favorite kitchen knife against you while you sleep. I want a robot where the probability of that occurring is zero.
Or unlocking your doors while you’re on vacation. If there’s a way to operate it remotely then it will get operated remotely.
You shouldn't have to connect it to the Internet, period, even for software updates (SDCards exist). Internet connected in-home devices with cameras and (presumably) microphones = privacy disaster, spyware and telemetry. NOPE for me, too.
I put my clothes into the clothes bin directly without using the floor as a temporary storage space.
No stairs, no go.
> Practical and delightful robots, shipping today.
...
> Deliveries to California begin in Fall 2026. Broader U.S. availability starting in 2027.
No legs? Call it what it is: Dalek
Indeed - I look forward to the spa version of this that runs around yelling "Exfoliate!, Exfoliate!" : )
If it needs a remote hooman operator at any point, it's an absolute no go for me. Dead on arrival.
I'd love to own one of these!
It could fold my laundry while I'm busy working from home as a teleoperator for Weave Robots.
They charge you for the privilege of folding your own laundry. Brilliant.
But you would also be getting paid. Literally arbitrage laundering.
The first thing that jumped out at me is its form factor. It is easier to engineer (cheaper) and less threatening than a bipedal robot. The drawback, of course, is that it is less mobile.
Yeah, I would consider getting one for my 94 year old grandmother, but there are 2 steps between her bedroom and the laundry room, and this can't cut it.
Imagine the enhanced Evil Maid attacks your could peform
I mean its a start to getting something to market? It just looks way behind the chinese models that are being delivered.
Honestly if this actually worked to fold laundry, teleoperation or not, I'd buy it.
Just prove to me it's deaf. I don't care who sees me naked that's their problem not mine.
Product page: https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-1
Thanks! This should be the link, or to their announcement.
The article page on runtimewire is slop with a lot of distracting design elements and even a “WHY IT MATTERS” title, which is just cringe.
Thanks! we've made that the main link and put the submitted link in the toptext.
Once again, the text is riddled with LLM'isms. Is this the new norm nowadays? Looking at OP's submission history, it's evident that they are utilizing HN for SEO farming.
A much more valuable discussion would be centered around the company's own website, which contains the same information, and doesn't require an LLM mediator: https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-1
The post actually has important context that you won't find on the polished launch page.
Teleoperation looks like a great business opportunity. Hire voyeurs for cheap and sell to exhibitionists.
Connecting voyeurs and exhibitionists is already a great business idea - don’t know why we need to add robots to the mix.
That business idea is already taken. It’s OnlyFans and it has more revenue than a top 10 company on the US stock market.
This will clean a home while the owner is away and be a teledildonics platform while they're home.
Forget voyeurs, operators will scan for valuables and sell that data along with owner schedule for some extra money on the side.
Everything about this product looks terrible.
Must operate on a perfectly flat surface. My roomba could probably handle a larger carpet curb than that top-heavy thing.
Head and eyes appear to be at human crotch level for some reason... gross.
What a waste of engineering talent.
Surrogate slavery is going to be a large business one day.
If you are telling me that one day I'll have a robot that cooks, cleans, is a personal assistant, a therapist. Eventually it'll be a chauffeur, babysitter, and obviously sex slave.
Why wouldn't i pay 50000 for that, besides the obvious "you are a creep" like why do I care when it's coming and market forces are going to make it an indistinguishable substitute human a la Joi from blade runner?
Because your sex slave uses teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion?
That's gonna be a bonus for some people.
Is "task completion" an euphemism for "happy ending"?
The cylinder must not be harmed.
Someone or thing to help with chores would be great.
But abject exploitation? Sex slave, even? I should hope we can find a little decency within ourselves..
https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Robosexuality
Could it become true ?
Well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_fetishism we live in the future already
> a robot that cooks, cleans, is a personal assistant, a therapist. Eventually it'll be a chauffeur, babysitter, and obviously sex slave.
Used to be called "a wife", before emancipation.
Seriously though, the future is made of human beings more and more isolated from each other because technology will give us all that we used to get from other people, with none of the annoyances. Each the king or queen of their solipsistic kingdom.
Separate people are easier to control, collective action is anathema to the ruling class.
A robot babysitter sounds like a suggestion made by somebody who doesn't have kids.
I'm not seeing how this is different from a regular remote worker in terms of ethics?
This is like a demo iPhone 1 where Optimis will be the iPhone 17 Pro
2027 will be the year of the robots.
I also saw Tesla is ramping up to make millions of Optimus robots. And Amazon bought Fauna robotics which I predict we will start seeing "last 100 ft" deliveries soon. Amazon's Rivian packmobile will pull up to a block and 5 Fauna robots (they are short) will jump out and start delivering packages to the neighborhood.
The robots are coming...
Do we have any evidence that Tesla is actually working on manufacturing millions of robots?
I mean, it's entirely possible that Elon Musk is lying about the whole humanoid Tesla robot thing and it's a total utter scam and that everything online is just cgi, but let's pretend he's not that much of a scam artist.
Not CGI - just human-controlled:
https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1ph3scw/tesla_opt...
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-optimus-robots-bartend...
They cancelled the production of two vehicles, announced that those lines will be retooled for the robots , and they have jobs recs out. Who knows if they will be able to sell millions but it doesn't sound like they're not trying.
https://www.tesla.com/careers/search/?region=5&site=US&state...
They can always sell them to SpaceX, those guys have lots of money.
yeah, the production lines are in Reno, NV