Can a $55,000-plus robot load the dishwasher? Inside my afternoon with two humanoid housekeepers.

By Christine Ji

Tau Robotics' humanoids vacuumed my floors and wiped my counters - with some help from humans behind the scenes

The humanoid robot - or rather, the teleoperator - waves hello.

For all of its capabilities, artificial intelligence has yet to save us from tidying up before the cleaner comes.

In fact, I took extra precautions in anticipation of having robot cleaners in my apartment. I taped over pictures of myself and put away anything with personal information, so that Tau Robotics' bipedal robots wouldn't collect any identifying data.

Tau will send a robot to your house or office for the modest price of $30 an hour, or $60 for a pair, though the company provided my session free of charge. Bolo and Sergey, the two robots that showed up at my door on Sunday afternoon, are roughly the size and shape of a third grader - if a third grader had angular joints and a wifi router for a head. Cameras mounted on their wrists and heads gather video footage, which is first used by off-site teleoperators to steer the robots, and later by Tau to train more advanced AI models.

The robots arrived accompanied by Ted Pinkerton, a founding engineer at Tau, who communicated with Bolo and Sergey's human operators through a Bluetooth earpiece.

Tau is developing a general-purpose AI model for robots, which it runs on customized third-party hardware. The company has much bigger ambitions than just cleaning, envisioning a world with robots capable of doing tasks like plumbing, electrical work, carpentry and elderly care.

But arriving at the future of autonomous robot helpers will require more data, smarter AI models and better hardware. At least for now, Bolo and Sergey have a ways to go before they can successfully do what's second nature to humans.

When I asked if the robots could load the dishwasher, for example, Pinkerton said yes, but caveated that they've broken a dish before while working with a customer who agreed to the risk. The robots' pincer-like hands make it challenging to grasp slippery and heavy ceramics. Still, I was curious to test their capabilities, so Pinkerton ushered a robot to my kitchen sink, where I had assembled a small selection of dishes that I deemed expendable.

The robot encounters a challenge when it tries to place a knife into the utensil basket.

"This is one area we're not quite confident in," Pinkerton said as we watched the robot attempt to align a glass on the dishwasher's prongs with motions suggestive of a claw-machine arm. Lacking fingers with flexible joints, the robot's grippers had difficulty getting traction on the smooth surface of the glass.

Eventually, the robot gripped the glass by the rim, maneuvered it into place and threw its hands in the air in triumph. It returned to the sink and began putting plates and cups in at a faster pace. But later, the task of aligning a small knife into the utensil basket proved to be another challenge. When the knife fell flat across the basket, the robot's hands had difficulty grabbing the thin piece of metal.

Well, that's why the robots were practicing in my apartment. Luckily, no dishes were harmed in the process.

Also: The U.S. can't find enough of this critical machine component to win the humanoid-robots race

Human-shaped robots

Founded in 2024, Tau began working on humanoids, or general-purpose robots with a human-like body structure, a year ago. The company identified cleaning as its first business application this past May.

Tau operates a fleet of eight robots, shuttling them around the city two at a time in a blue Honda minivan. In the coming years, Tau plans to scale up the number of cleanings and expand its service beyond San Francisco.

"Initially, the idea was just to have a huge warehouse with robot arms collecting lots of data autonomously," co-founder Alexander Koch told me over a video call. "But we figured out that you should go out in the real world since it's hard to get realistic data in a lab environment." Instead of programming the humanoids under controlled conditions, Tau is sending its robots into homes to learn through first-hand experience.

Tau's pivot from robot arms to full-fledged humanoids reflects a broader shift in the robotics landscape. Advancements in AI models have transformed how robots learn, allowing them to more accurately predict the next sequence of joint movements needed to lift a cup or pick up a broom.

"If you want a robot that can easily adapt to the human environment, to do tasks which have generalizability, a humanoid is the best choice," Yi Guo, an engineering professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology who specializes in robotics, told me.

Roboticists are hopeful that AI can turn humanoids, once seen as a technological non-starter, into a viable industry. Technologists envision a future where robots can supplement a declining labor force caused by shifting demographics, and spare humans from dangerous and dirty work.

But fitting dozens of motors and sensors into a human-shaped metal frame is a complex and expensive engineering challenge. Underneath the Tau uniforms, the robots' bodies are a modified version of the Unitree (CN:688836) G1 Chinese humanoid, which cost around $55,000 each before any customizations.

(On a side note, Pinkerton told me that maintaining the robots' uniforms is an uphill battle. Their shirts and pants are dotted with holes. "You have no idea how hard it is to keep clothes in good condition when the robot is made of metal," Pinkerton said. "It's not going to stop us, but I would like if they didn't look like they were wearing rags.")

The robot's modified Unitree G1 body peeks out from underneath its uniform.

Earlier legged robots, such as Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot, favored quadruped designs for balance and support. "For a humanoid, two legs is harder," Guo said. "The speed is relatively slow and it's heavy." Just walking around is a challenge, as the robot needs to constantly rebalance itself as it shifts weight from one foot to another. A minor stumble could become a safety hazard if the robot falls over, she added.

As the robots arrived, I became concerned that just reaching the front door of my third-floor walk-up would be an issue. Stair-climbing has stumped the robotics field for decades, as the activity requires continuous center-of-gravity shifts and visual information processing. And three flights of stairs with an armful of groceries is already an ordeal for humans.

But with their capabilities supplemented by human teleoperators, Tau's robots climbed with deliberate accuracy, albeit a little slowly. The narrow stairway was filled with the heavy whirring of gears and joints as the robots steadily lurched upward.

"That may be the most flights of stairs we've ever done," Pinkerton told me after the robots finished their ascent.

Perhaps the biggest unsolved problem is recreating the dexterity of human hands with high-precision sensors and motors, a shortfall that was on full display when the robot loaded my dishwasher.

Existing five-fingered hands on the market aren't reliable enough for the work that Tau's robots are doing, Pinkerton told me. They break easily, are notoriously intricate and require being shipped out to third parties for repairs.

"We could probably do more with a more dexterous hand," Pinkerton said. "We're hoping someone will come out with one. Put that out there as a call to action for someone to make a really good hand."

'Edge cases'

Across roughly 160 paid robot hours and nearly 100 cleanings, Tau's early runs have spotlighted the unpredictability of operating human-shaped robots in the real world.

"There are gigantic differences in the complexity of tasks," co-founder Koch said. For example, vacuuming an empty hallway is a simple task that can be automated with relatively little data. But robots running around in your house encounter a variety of "edge cases," or situations the robots encounter rarely, that could take many years to fully automate - as was the case when the vacuum cleaner became entangled with a mouse trap during one of Tau's earlier cleanings, Koch told me.

The robot pushes books to the side as it wipes the coffee table surface.

Back in my apartment, Bolo and Sergey were experiencing their fair share of edge cases. The robot in the living room slowly shifted a stack of books to the side as it began wiping down the coffee table. Later, it encountered a stray charging cord snaking across the ground as it vacuumed. It bent over, clamped the cord with its pincers and tucked the cord along a shelf to clear a path. In the kitchen, the other robot picked up a spoon rest and placed it out of the way as it began cleaning the counter.

The robots carried out some tasks - such as mopping, vacuuming, wiping and dusting - with surprising skill. I had invited them into my apartment expecting an awkward demonstration, but the work was remarkably thorough and spared me from having to do it myself.

Chores like folding laundry posed a bigger challenge. Tau doesn't specifically advertise folding clothes as a capability on its website right now. But in a Reuters video last month, co-founder Cornelia Weinzierl said that with teleoperation, the robots can do anything from changing bed sheets to scrubbing the toilet. "Basically, what a human can do, it can also do," she added.

The robot successfully folds a towel.

I handed over a towel and a pair of pants and watched as the robot went to work. Over the course of four minutes, the robot fumbled with the towel's floppy and unwieldy shape as it slowly smoothed out the fabric, located the corners and lined up the edges. The pants, made from stiffer denim, proved to be slightly easier, and the robot finished the task in a little over a minute. Still, the robots have some homework to do before they can make a dent in your laundry tasks.

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