Tau’s humanoid robots scrub toilets for $100 a visit, and a human steers them

Tau Robotics will send two humanoid robots into your home to wipe the counters, mop the floors and clean the toilet. The catch sits back at the company’s headquarters: a human pilot watches through cameras in each robot’s head and wrists and steers much of what it does. That makes the San Francisco startup’s service less a robot butler than a remote-controlled cleaner that records its own training data as it works.

For anyone who has waited years for a household robot, this is one of the first you can actually book, and it shows how far the idea still has to go. Co-founder Cornelia Weinzierl says the machines can already vacuum and mop on their own. Making a bed or folding a T-shirt is different: a person performs the motion remotely and the robot copies it, a technique known as kinematic guidance.

The price is lower than the hardware suggests. Tau now charges $60 for a weekly cleaning with two robots, or $100 for a one-time visit, according to MIT Technology Review, whose reporter booked the service without saying she was a journalist. When the pilot opened, an hour with a single robot cost $30. Each robot costs about $50,000 to build, chief executive Alexander Koch told CBS News, so the fee works more like a data subsidy: every wiped counter becomes an example Tau’s AI models can learn from.

The machines stand about four and a half feet tall, shorter than most adults, with 3D-printed heads carrying the antennas that link them to headquarters. Instead of hands they have 3D-printed claws, because more humanlike hands were not durable enough and claws handle most cleaning jobs well. They arrive by minivan with a human supervisor, wear a Tau shirt and grippy socks so they don’t scratch hardwood floors, and answer when you talk to them.

The hands-on test shows the gap between the pitch and the apartment. On the first visit the robot climbed the building’s front steps like a drunk, and a carpeted staircase beat it entirely, so Weinzierl carried it the last few steps. It then stalled again and again, because the heat had shut down the equipment its remote pilot used to watch the job, and the visit ended early. A second cleaning went better, but the robot left taps dripping, knocked over a closed bottle of olive oil and toppled an air purifier it could not set upright.

Privacy is the other price. Tau’s pilots, who wear VR headsets according to CBS News, look through the robots’ eyes at your bedroom, your bathroom and whatever sits on the kitchen table, and that data is exactly what the company values most. Koch is candid about the limits. The robot “doesn’t know how to walk upstairs” or where to vacuum, he told CBS News, and that is “directed by mostly humans at the moment.” Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at UC Berkeley, warned that humanoids “look quite nimble, but they are actually quite heavy” and can thrash about when they fall.

When it works, it is oddly impressive. The head of the reporter’s toilet-cleaning wand fell off three times, and three times the robot reattached it by poking at it until the pieces met at the right angle. Other home humanoids, such as 1X’s Neo, have also relied on remote operators for tasks they cannot yet handle alone, which makes Tau’s setup an unusually open look at where the whole category stands.

Availability is narrow. The service runs in the San Francisco Bay Area and, according to Tau’s website, Los Angeles, and new customers still join a waitlist. There is no announced launch in Europe, Asia or Latin America. Tau opened its pilot in July and has completed only a couple of hundred cleanings, while Koch told CBS News the target is 1,000 cleanings a week in San Francisco by 2027, followed by other US cities and international markets in 2028.

Weinzierl argues that robots belong in a job with high turnover, a high risk of injury and, as she puts it, one that “no one wants to do”, and Tau is already looking at mold remediation and home health care. For now, every humanoid that cleans a San Francisco apartment still has a person behind it, doing the job from somewhere else.

Tags: robotics, humanoid robots, home robots, Alexander Koch, MIT Technology Review, robot cleaning