The dream of coming home to a spotless kitchen you didn’t have to clean yourself is edging closer to reality.
We’re used to seeing robotic vacuums cleaning our floors — but what about all our other chores? Humanoid robots are being engineered to take care of more complex tasks around the house, from folding laundry to loading the dishwasher.
This month, San Francisco-based startup Tau Robotics began letting residents hire robots, dressed in company uniforms and given names like Chelsea and Elon, to vacuum, wipe down counters and take out the trash for $30 an hour as part of a pilot program open to 1,000 homes.
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Chinese firm UniX AI has gone further still, announcing commercial deliveries of Panther, a wheeled humanoid that can make the bed, clean toilets and cook breakfast, holding a spatula to fry an egg before washing its hands in the sink.
Not to be outdone, 1X’s Neo Gamma — a 5-foot-6-inch (1.7 meters) humanoid that can fold shirts and answer the door — is now available for around $20,000. But not all humanoids are as independent as they look.
Some “autonomous” home robots still have a real person quietly steering them through the tricky bits — so your house helper might come with an uninvited houseguest. Even the ones that are truly on their own tend to shine brightest in their promotional videos, which are typically filmed in tidy, controlled settings rather than in a real, cluttered home — so a robot’s demo reel grace doesn’t always survive contact with your kitchen floor.
That said, would you trust a robot to handle your breakfast eggs — or would you rather cook them yourself, just in case? Tell us in the poll below, and let us know in the comments what chore you’d hand off first.
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