> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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) but fall apart on repetitive simple things. 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.
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’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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
"... 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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!
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.
I think (hope) the poster who suggested that was being sarcastic, although it's hard to tell anymore!
Gross.
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.
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.
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.
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) but fall apart on repetitive simple things. 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.
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’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.
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!
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.
This looks like something from 80s sci-fi and far behind what Unitree has.
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.
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.
Yeah this piece of marketing got me:
> Made to fit in every home, including yours.
Unless that home has stairs
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.
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.
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.
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?
How about a centaur? - https://www.satyress.com/
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.
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
So you will have low-paid Africans from 3rd world countries tele-operating a robots in rich peoples houses doing chores?
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
And watching you have sex -- that's their weekly bonus.
That reminds me of this 90's very very NSFF ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc0BUPRTX2Q
* Not safe for feminists
the way it peeks over the couch in the landing page video :'D
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 product specs are pretty light on details. Weight? Speed? Capabilities? How loud is it?
So that laundry task is not possible due to wheels at least in my house. You need to Cary this guy everywhere lol
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.
It looks terribly depressed, lonely and sad.
at least we have that in common
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.
"... 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.
Soooo close, but I have a 4 floor house. Talk to me when it does stairs.
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 wonder how this thing would hold up against a dog
I put my clothes into the clothes bin directly without using the floor as a temporary storage space.
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 ?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.
> a Weave specialist
Lol. Folding engineer.
RadioShack where are you, you should be selling these.
No legs? Call it what it is: Dalek
Indeed - I look forward to the spa version of this that runs around yelling "Exfoliate!, Exfoliate!" : )
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.
I mean its a start to getting something to market? It just looks way behind the chinese models that are being delivered.
Product page: https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-1
Thanks! we've made that the main link and put the submitted link in the toptext.
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.
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
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.
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 babysitter sounds like a suggestion made by somebody who doesn't have kids.
> 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.
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?
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
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...