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Humanoid robots are cleaning homes in San Francisco. It costs $30 an hour
Tau Robotics has launched a service in San Francisco allowing residents to hire humanoid robots for cleaning at $30 per hour.
A robotics company has begun offering humanoid robots for cleaning houses in San Francisco. Tau Robotics announced the service last month, claiming that their robots can clean surfaces, take out the trash, vacuum floors and tidy up everyday clutter, among other things.
The Tau robots come dressed in black uniforms and have names like Chelsea, Elon and Tony. The company uses artificial intelligence to train the robots, each of which costs around $50,000 to build.
Alexander Koch, the startup’s CEO, yesterday shared a video of the robots in action.
Take a look at the video below:
How much will the service cost?
San Francisco residents can book one humanoid robot for $30 an hour. Booking two robots will cost $60 per hour.
“You can now book two humanoids for our cleaning service in SF. One humanoid for 60 minutes is $30, two are $60,” Koch said in his X post.
For context, the minimum wage in San Francisco is currently $19.61.
Who can book the service?
Tau's service is currently invite-only, which means that people interested in robotic house cleaning will have to sign up and join a waitlist.
"I think many of our initial customers are people who didn't have house cleaners, or are not that frequent house cleaners, human house cleaners, so it mainly just makes the market bigger," Koch was quoted as saying by ABC News.
Are the Tau robots fully autonomous?
In a word: No.
CEO Alexander Koch said that robots are supervised by humans. “A human is always supervising the AI and guiding it at different levels,” he clarified on X.
Speaking to CBS News, he elaborated: “It doesn't know how to walk upstairs, for example. It doesn't know where to vacuum. That's directed by mostly humans at the moment.”
Privacy concerns over cleaning service
Experts have expressed concerns about the security and privacy implications of using such robots in homes.
Tau's humanoid robots have two cameras that function as their eyes, with the footage collected being used to train the company's AI and enhance its capabilities. Experts say that these cameras could also inadvertently record sensitive personal information, including receipts, bills or other private items kept inside people's homes.
Koch, when asked about the company's data security measures, said Tau has "full control" over the information gathered by its robots. He added that "The camera system, the networking and the computers are all our own,".
