Vitaly Stockman

Tau Robotics’s take on house-cleaning robots

Humanoid robot in a black Tau Robotics branded shirt at a dining table, with a white sensor head and robotic gripper hand clearly visible
Dress it in a branded shirt and it almost passes — until you look at the head and the hand.

In recent days, Tau Robotics has been making headlines, with the media often showing their videos of a bit scruffy-looking robot getting out of the car by itself and performing the cleaning duties.

All six clips are at the bottom of this post — jump straight to the videos.

The pitch line is that for $30 an hour, it will clean up your house.

The first thing that catches the attention is the suspiciously fluid movements of the robot, but then it is covered by black clothes, so you almost do not see the humanoid robot body at all. Makes one even wonder if there is a tiny human inside pretending to be a robot (because it does look pretty good compared to usual demonstrations of top robots like Figure 03 and Optimus Gen 3).

I had to dig deeper, and it turns out there is indeed robot hardware inside, but it is good old Unitree G1 🤖, the most numerous humanoid robot model on the planet right now (out of 12k+ humanoid robots shipped globally).

But what makes its movement so fluid? It’s the teleoperation. Tau Robotics does not hide this. Its movements are so good because it is an actual human wearing a VR headset with a video stream and a body sensor suit doing the right movements that are broadcast remotely to the robot body. And it made a perfect demo effect; that is why the news picked it up so well.

With the recent humanoid robot import ban in the US, new models of Unitree will be impossible to bring to the US for such new startups. I don’t think they would pull this off if they had to pay for the US alternative (the best of which aren’t even for sale yet, and the ones that are are orders of magnitude more expensive, prohibitive for most new startups in the beginning). I hope this regulation gets cancelled, just like the ban on exporting Fable / Mythos AI models was eventually lifted.

And this is where the two halves of this story meet. Tau can only do this because they got their G1s in before the door closed. The next founder with the same idea will not have that option, and the US alternative will not be on the shelf at any price a new startup can pay.

That is what a ban like this actually costs. Not Unitree’s sales, they will be fine. The experiments that never get run.

Back to Tau Robotics, well done Alexander Koch! This is exactly what we need, more use cases demonstrated to the public, to activate people’s imagination in this direction. 🤠

The clips

All six clips are from Tau Robotics’ own website. Worth watching with the teleoperation in mind.

The shot that did the rounds: the robot opens the sliding door, climbs out of the van on its own and picks up its bag.
Wiping down the table. Look just above the hoodie and the Unitree G1 head gives the game away.
Vacuuming the living room floor, then dropping into a crouch to get under the furniture.
Taking the bag out of the kitchen bin — a two-handed job that is much harder than it looks.
The same job from floor level: the rug under the dining table, stepping around the chair legs.
And the general case — clearing bottles and clutter off a kitchen worktop.

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