Humanoid cleaning robots featuring Unitree's Chinese tech go viral in San Francisco

CEO of Tau Robotics, Alexander Koch, announced in an X post that the San Francisco startup has begun renting humanoid robots to clean people’s homes. 

The service would cost customers $30 an hour, even though the robots aren’t autonomous. Their hardware is made by Unitree, a Chinese manufacturer. However, the Trump administration has recently placed a ban on Chinese robot imports.

A human takes the wheel the whole time

Tau has a public waitlist and operates an invite-only service, with each visit lasting an hour. When a customer requests the service, a staff member drops off the robot at the customer’s home while a trained operator at Tau’s facility drives it. This happens in real time as an AI system manages balance and motor control.

According to Alex Koch, the service is “conceptually similar to autonomous driving,” that is, an individual retains full control of the robot until the technology can be trusted to function alone.

Human oversight is critical to the operations because today’s AI “cannot fully control a humanoid robot on its own,” thus an operator has to run the machine from Tau’s facility.

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