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Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
https://runtimewire.com/article/weave-robotics-isaac-1-home-robot-launch https://runtimewire.com/article/weave-robotics-isaac-1-home-...
- theplumber 3mo agoFor the people complaining about human operators: Stop bitching! It will be just like us vibe-coding on multi monitors. This is the future of work.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> 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.
- guiomie 3mo agoSame, 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.
- throw310822 3mo agoCan't wait for the Uber version, where anyone with five minutes to spare can fold your laundry from their home.
- gigel82 3mo agoHoly 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.
- deadbabe 3mo agoOr 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.
- ceejayoz 3mo agoGross.
- gigel82 3mo agoWe'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.
- ryandrake 3mo agoI think (hope) the poster who suggested that was being sarcastic, although it's hard to tell anymore!
- Schiendelman 3mo agoThe math doesn't math. You could tax all the ultra rich people at 100% and it wouldn't significantly change the social contract. The part people don't like hearing is that it's a lot of the middle class that has to pay much higher taxes if you want those guarantees of minimum living standards.
- goobatrooba 3mo agoCitation needed. Here is one for the contrary (just a book review. The citation is the book). https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/06/we-need-to-tax-billionaires-at-2-economist-gabriel-zucman-just-explained-exactly-how/ https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/06/we-need-to-tax-billiona...
- ares623 3mo agoNah. At least with Uber the driver has self-preservation as an incentive to not just fuck around. What incentive would a freelance nobody have to not do the funniest shit possible inside a stranger's home at least once.
- coffeebeqn 3mo agoTele-operation through a video feed(?) inside my home. Yeah that sounds pretty creepy
- arcticbull 3mo agoIf 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.
- BobbyTables2 3mo agoThey’re also much less likely to film their activities and upload it to the Internet…
- bobbylarrybobby 3mo agoPaying for someone to clean your house? Thats so last year. Why an AI company cleaned my New York City apartment for free https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwerjy20kyo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwerjy20kyo
- arcticbull 3mo ago> However, Kilic said Shift was "the most honest platform by far regarding what happens to your data". Good good
- 3mo ago
- stubish 3mo ago> Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance. This will almost certainly depend on the customer and residence. I don't think subscription pricing will be fair, but it can at least be budgeted for out of pensions and such for the people needing to pay for assistance.
- culi 3mo agoIf I'm gonna be an early adopter and give them such valuable training data, they should at least give me stock options
- Schiendelman 3mo agoI think they're giving you the robot at half price.
- 4d4m 3mo agoI agree - the purchase price barely clears BOM before assembly. But I like that they're not really overpromising much, the use-cases are pretty narrow still.
- conductr 3mo agoGiven how incapable my robotic vacuums and lawnmowers have proven to be, even after several years of iterations, I’d almost prefer if it was all teleoperation and it would hopefully unlock a huge amount of additional tasks it could preform. This would essentially let me hire a human housekeeper at a global vs local wage which is very appealing.
- joe_the_user 3mo agoThe robot has a two pronged gripper. I wonder what teleoperating that to do complex tasks would be like.
- ben_w 3mo agoIMO, hard part is likely the lack of haptic feedback, not that it's just a simple gripper. Small and big feedback, so you don't break eggs (not accidentally at least), and also don't pick up a heavy load that makes the robot topple over and give the remote operator motion sickness in the process. There's a surprising number of labour simulators sold as VR headset games: https://skyhookgames.com/lawn-mowing-simulator-vr-is-out-now/ https://skyhookgames.com/lawn-mowing-simulator-vr-is-out-now... https://www.futurlab.co.uk/games/powerwash-simulator-vr https://www.futurlab.co.uk/games/powerwash-simulator-vr https://gg.deals/game/bartender-vr-simulator/ https://gg.deals/game/bartender-vr-simulator/
- conductr 3mo agoI’m not sure remote operations needs to be like a VR sim or joystick control of every movement. It might be something more similar to prompts. “Go to front door” “bring in packages” “open packages” “sort trash into pile” <click for item select>”is not trash” “take trash to bin”. Once the house is mapped and a good deal of these routines are learned they can be executed with some fuzzy input to the automation. In my mind this is still full teleoperation It would be great if the operator could say things like, in above example, “you forgot to close the door, make sure you never leave this door open, even if you have to open it for a task and it’s not explicitly said you should always imply the door needs to be closed after the task. As a general rule, the door should never be open longer than 1 minute longer than it needs to be for task performance” or something similar and this trains the model over time.
- greggsy 3mo agoThe clothes folding is almost certainly a person. This sort of menial task would likely be given to someone in a poorer part of the world, who ironically will be some of the first to master the first generation of remotely operated high tech robots. The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots.
- usrnm 3mo ago> The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots If anything, robots will make rich people richer and their position more secure. Once again, you're hoping for a technological solution to non-technological problems
- wartywhoa23 3mo ago> The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots. $7,999 a clanker. I can totally imagine hordes of poor people driving around in turret-equipped F-150s packed with robots in evil facemasks. - Hey, bankster, hands upon the fucking wall!
- greggsy 3mo agoI’m not sure you understand the comment
- wartywhoa23 3mo agoUpon re-reading it, yes, I apologize, got it wrong. An army of poor people remotely controlling an army of robots already implanted into rich houses would be fun.
- vidarh 3mo agoIf it were to get to that point, they are already inside your house, paid for by you.
- npodbielski 3mo agoHow? If something like that would happen robots would be disabled in 5 minutes.
- beAbU 3mo agoOh 100% haha. Looking at that video on their website I'm pretty sure it's mostly just remote control. The conditions are ripe for a builder.ai esque scam but with robotics.
- pj_mukh 3mo agoDo I care? The job gets done and I don’t have to bother with letting someone physically into my home. As a parent this seems godsent if it works as advertised just for its overnight reset. Now if they can’t make the autonomy work to maintain the economics then I’d need an exit clause but other than that, have at it boss.
- grumbelbart2 3mo agoThe risk is that this does not scale, they run out of money, the robot won't work any more, and you payed a lot for nothing.
- pj_mukh 3mo agoYea I would hope for sustainable teleop unit economics and then VC money for autonomy. But I don’t need high percentage autonomy out of the box was my point.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3mo agoBut you'd get to keep the robot, no?
- Schiendelman 3mo agoNot for nothing. None of these companies are going to prioritize difficult physical prevention of you running your own OS, and there are already open source robotics companies where you can run your own stack. A lot of the brain hardware in these things is going to be Nvidia Jetson.
- danmaz74 3mo agoHow much does the monthly subscription cost?
- ActionHank 3mo agoEvery single one of these robot plays are going to try pivot to having someone do you laundry remotely for a dollar a day. If they ever get the tech down (I doubt it), they will then try move to broader labour replacement. This is why all the robots need to be humanoid.
- aspenmartin 3mo agoCurious why you feel they won’t get the tech down? I think these products are all data plays right now.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- KaiserPro 3mo agoManipulating soft bodies is exceptionally difficult to do with robotics. moving a soft object from a to b is doable, folding/separating/sorting at any kind of speed is very much an area of active research.
- aspenmartin 3mo agoTotally agree but the idea is this gives you a teleoperation environment that is truly on policy and not some artificial lab. The idea is that these robots, like those Amazon stores, are predominantly just controlled by actual humans.
- iterateoften 3mo agoYeah but if it’s a person seeing inside my home I would rather it be the same person over and over and without cameras. Teleoperated robots are a better fit for businesses and public spaces
- aspenmartin 3mo agoHey I totally agree I do not want a teleoperator looking into my house, it’s just so deliciously tempting to get in home on policy data. Not sure the reason why they are super interested in home environments vs business or public spaces.
- giarc 3mo agoI watched the promo video somewhere and when folding the blanket, the video cuts and edits were very suspicious. I doubt it can fold a blanket at all.
- jfengel 3mo agoThey do show it folding shirts, which I'd think are harder than blankets. Is your doubt caused by blankets being bigger than shirts? (I didn't see it folding a button-up shirt, only tee-shirts. That's an extra degree of difficult and I do doubt that it can do that.)
- YeGoblynQueenne 3mo agoYeah, again the WYSIWYG model of AI: if you see a robot folding a shirt, that robot can fold that shirt. Maybe it can fold another that's very similar, maybe only different in colour, but don't bet your money on it. A robot folds a shirt and you think it can fold a tee? Not unless it's explicitly trained to fold that one tee, too.
- giarc 3mo agoI think blankets are harder simply because of their size. I often have to "whip" the blanket to get the other end to properly fold on itself. I also use a much large space because of the size (often the floor). Could a robot fold a big blanket? Probably? But what is the success rate going to be? If I just have to refold it 50% of the time, is that actually worth it?
- nh23423fefe 3mo agoSurrogate 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?
- ifdefdebug 3mo agoBecause your sex slave uses teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion?
- ceejayoz 3mo agoThat's gonna be a bonus for some people.
- dvh 3mo agoIs "task completion" an euphemism for "happy ending"?
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoThe cylinder must not be harmed.
- pseudony 3mo agoSomeone 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..
- rvnx 3mo agohttps://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Robosexuality https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Robosexuality Could it become true ? Well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_fetishism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_fetishism we live in the future already
- ifdefdebug 3mo ago> 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.
- derektank 3mo agoUnderstandable 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.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3mo agoThat 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.
- BloondAndDoom 3mo agoSo much more of it, also strangers come and go, they are there, they knock and shout before entering a room where you might be changing clothes or taking shower. They will not only get leaked and abused internally, it will be also sold. They will also inevitable get hacked (storage or remote access), operators will be maybe even bribed for remote access to certain users, government will subpoena for remote access credentials and videos (assuming they are not going to be given a direct back door (similar to what Google and Meta did in the last). Current landscape user privacy in technology is a fucking mess, unless something technically designed (E2E, no remote access etc) to be private it’ll get abused and will be used against you. As someone who grew up and made a life out of technology I truly hate where we are with it and heavy capitalist and anti-consumer design of almost all new products.
- 3mo ago
- droidjj 3mo agoProduct page: https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-1 https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-1
- Stitch4223 3mo agoThanks! 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.
- dang 3mo agoThanks! we've made that the main link and put the submitted link in the toptext.
- sandworm101 3mo agoNo legs? Call it what it is: Dalek
- twoWhlsGud 3mo agoIndeed - I look forward to the spa version of this that runs around yelling "Exfoliate!, Exfoliate!" : )
- rvnx 3mo agoFeels 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 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. Weave says the robot blends autonomy with teleoperation (remote assistance by a Weave specialist) to guarantee that we complete every fold 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 ?
- throw310822 3mo ago> a Weave specialist Lol. Folding engineer.
- fragmede 3mo agoYou 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?
- TurdF3rguson 3mo agoIt's tricky but I'm betting it's possible to teleoperate sending all their jewelry to the philippines.
- stubish 3mo ago$450 USD / month to have a human turn up every day? $15 USD per day, including weekends? Around here you might just about get the minimum of 1 hour/day for 10 times that. This will be life changing for the elderly and disabled if they can pull it off. If you have socialized care, the government would even probably pay since it will be cheaper than aged care facilities.
- imtringued 3mo agoWhy does the human have to turn up every day? You're the one who added that requirement. That's on you. The moment you reduce it down to 10 visits per month you're already at $45 per visit. Let's say 6 visits to different people per day and since there are 21 working days per month on average that is 21/10*6*$450 = $5785 or $70k in revenue per year. You can't tell me that this wouldn't pay for an employee that doesn't require office space. Maybe $450 per month is too cheap and it has to be raised slightly, but this would pay for an entry level cleaner even in San Francisco.
- redsocksfan45 3mo ago[dead]
- johnnyApplePRNG 3mo agoEverything 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- johndenverscar 3mo agoI wonder how this thing would hold up against a dog
- pupppet 3mo agoRadioShack where are you, you should be selling these.
- para_parolu 3mo agoWhen 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.
- ceejayoz 3mo agoEntomophobia/arachnophobia is far too common for giant bug-like robots in folks' bedrooms.
- throw310822 3mo agoA couple hundred legs would be optimal.
- 05 3mo agoThey 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
- solid_fuel 3mo agoGoing 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.
- bensyverson 3mo agoReal question: what about 3 legs? Is tripedal locomotion a viable compromise?
- 3mo ago
- NDlurker 3mo agoTeleoperation looks like a great business opportunity. Hire voyeurs for cheap and sell to exhibitionists.
- hettygreen 3mo agoI'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.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo agoThey charge you for the privilege of folding your own laundry. Brilliant.
- icepush 3mo agoBut you would also be getting paid. Literally arbitrage laundering.
- xpct 3mo agoOnce 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 https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-1
- ryanmerket 3mo agoThe post actually has important context that you won't find on the polished launch page.
- ElijahLynn 3mo ago2027 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...
- joelthelion 3mo agoDo we have any evidence that Tesla is actually working on manufacturing millions of robots?
- fragmede 3mo agoI 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.
- mikeyouse 3mo agoNot CGI - just human-controlled: https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1ph3scw/tesla_optimus_faints_when_operator_takes_off_vr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1ph3scw/tesla_opt... https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-optimus-robots-bartending-controlled-by-humans-2024-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-optimus-robots-bartend...
- fragmede 3mo agoEven if they're human controlled, the robots still need to exist to be human controlled.
- mikeyouse 3mo agoSure but it’s like self driving vs piloted cars.. both are impressive in their own way but if someone proposes to sell 10 billion humanoid robots like Musk has, they obviously can’t be human-controlled.
- t1234s 3mo agoSo you will have low-paid Africans from 3rd world countries tele-operating a robots in rich peoples houses doing chores?
- throw310822 3mo agoExactly. 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.
- xpct 3mo agoYes, 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.
- outside1234 3mo ago[flagged]
- kylehotchkiss 3mo agothe way it peeks over the couch in the landing page video :'D
- netsharc 3mo agoThat reminds me of this 90's very very NSFF ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc0BUPRTX2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc0BUPRTX2Q * Not safe for feminists
- kyleee 3mo agoIs there an add on / subscription / higher tier where it joins in?
- prepend 3mo agoBetter than local servants doing chores.
- 3mo ago
- esafak 3mo agoThe 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.
- BizarroLand 3mo agoYeah, 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.
- michelb 3mo agoI mean its a start to getting something to market? It just looks way behind the chinese models that are being delivered.
- traverseda 3mo agoSo 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.
- prepend 3mo agoTesla operates vehicles for $100/month. I’m guessing whatever cloud ai this thing needs is less complicated and less money.
- wat10000 3mo agoTesla 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.
- yalogin 3mo ago8k 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.
- jimmygrapes 3mo agoSet 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!
- zokier 3mo agoI 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
- captn3m0 3mo agoThere are 2 complete folds in the Isaac 0 video around 0:40, but speeded up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KhImSR8GuCE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KhImSR8GuCE The about page claims 1000+ lbs of laundry folded every week.
- tencentshill 3mo agoThat's fine. Like a robot lawnmower - if it does it every day, it doesn't need to be as fast as a person.
- BizarroLand 3mo agoI would be happy if it could put my clothes on hangers without teleoperation.
- ziofill 3mo agoI'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.
- krupan 3mo agoAre these the same guys that were trashing airbnbs testing the robots?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 3mo agoNo, that was The Bot Company [1][2]. [1] https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/28/sf-startup-secretly-testing-robots-airbnbs-trashing-lawsuit-claims/ https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/28/sf-startup-secretly-testin... [2] https://www.bot.co/ https://www.bot.co/
- tantalor 3mo agoThe product specs are pretty light on details. Weight? Speed? Capabilities? How loud is it?
- t1234s 3mo agoThis is like a demo iPhone 1 where Optimis will be the iPhone 17 Pro
- prepend 3mo agoSeems 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.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo agoYup, not mentioning weight is problematic. I also want to understand pet safety.
- jvm___ 3mo ago-Phone notification- Your chinchilla had finished the wash cycle.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo agoI 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.
- xarope 3mo ago-Phone notification- Your chinchilla rug had finished the wash cycle I don't have a rug... oh wait...
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3mo agoYeah this piece of marketing got me: > Made to fit in every home, including yours. Unless that home has stairs
- levocardia 3mo agoI have a startup idea: I will make the robot that ferries your laundry robot up and down the stairs.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- tibbon 3mo agoSoooo close, but I have a 4 floor house. Talk to me when it does stairs.
- gpm 3mo agoI'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.
- cortesoft 3mo agoRobots are used extensively for commercial purposes, though.
- gpm 3mo agoYeah, 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.
- jasonfarnon 3mo agoI think they mean something like at laundromats. Or those large commercial laundry services should be using them behind the scenes.
- dmix 3mo agoThe 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.
- stubish 3mo agoI think that is backwards. If you are replacing full time staff you need a system that works just as fast for the same or less money. For home use, you don't care if it takes 3 hours to make your bed or just stops for a while when waiting for a teleoperator to become available.
- maxdo 3mo agoSo that laundry task is not possible due to wheels at least in my house. You need to Cary this guy everywhere lol
- tedggh 3mo agoIt looks terribly depressed, lonely and sad.
- wayeq 3mo agoat least we have that in common
- the_sleaze_ 3mo ago"The first 10 million [pounds of laundry] were the worst, after that everything went downhill" - Marvin the household laundry bot
- emsign 3mo agoI put my clothes into the clothes bin directly without using the floor as a temporary storage space.
- Art9681 3mo ago"... 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.
- throwaway173738 3mo agoOr unlocking your doors while you’re on vacation. If there’s a way to operate it remotely then it will get operated remotely.
- ryandrake 3mo agoYou 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.
- SamuelAdams 3mo agoCan 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.
- storus 3mo agoThis looks like something from 80s sci-fi and far behind what Unitree has.
- XorNot 3mo agoHonestly if this actually worked to fold laundry, teleoperation or not, I'd buy it. Just prove to me it's deaf. I don't care who sees me naked that's their problem not mine.
- sandcat_ 3mo agoThat is one of the creepiest things I've seen in a while! And the first time something akin to uncanny valley has gotten me. The way it slowly raises out of its dock. The arms just hanging there in the photo at the bottom. The weirdly broad 'smile' it seems to have (it's just the lip of the head I think, but it looks like a very creepy smile to me). Its slow methodical movements. The way it wheeled past that doorway. Eurghh. Is it just me? I feel like I could never relax with this in my home. Like I'll turn around to find it inches away from me, watching.
- levocardia 3mo agoI was actually waiting for it to pull out a butcher knife and reveal the landing page is actually a promo for a techno-horror film.
- uriahlight 3mo agoIf it needs a remote hooman operator at any point, it's an absolute no go for me. Dead on arrival.
- proee 3mo agoCould work well in vacation rentals where items in the house are well defined with very specific put back places.
- t1234s 3mo agoThis thing looks like they should package in a vacuum / floor washer into its base and something to empty/replenish it into that large base unit it docks with.
- 3fffss 3mo ago[dead]
- slashdave 3mo agoThank goodness! That pillow has been in the wrong place on my sofa for weeks and I didn't know what to do!
- thelastgallon 3mo agoWhats doable with todays technology is to give people walking robots[1] and instantly enable last mine connectivity to all metro/train/bus transit. Bikes (and e-scooters, one wheels) are a decent solution, but you can't take them in most metros or buses. 2nd/3rd world infrastructure is pothole ridden, not even ready for bikes. Walking can take you everywhere. [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G3oP9T5LQ64 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G3oP9T5LQ64
- AussieWog93 3mo agoHN seems really, really negative this week for some reason (it maybe it's just me). This seems cool, even if it's really just teleoperated.
- manoDev 3mo agoSelling tele-operated robots in the hopes you get AI valuation is borderline scam IMO. This is hiring a human worker with extra steps, worse cost benefit and in a dehumanising manner.
- AussieWog93 3mo agoTheir plan is surely to collect huge amounts of training data and replace the human workers.
- BloondAndDoom 3mo agoThat’s how we ended up where we are. Which is effectively trading privacy to convince and cool everyday. Now the new generation doesn’t even understand what they are selling. I get what you are saying but unless we call it what it is (which is disgusting) we will just keep getting more of it, and will normalize this bullshit. (Intrusive products are already normalized but maybe we can slow the escalation of their intrusiveness). Even finding a non cloud-video photo uploading robot vacuum is a challenge if not impossible. Because we accept this bullshit we ended with no alternative privacy oriented design and solutions in the market. Unfortunately people don’t pay enough of a premium for real privacy.
- morpheuskafka 3mo agoIt's not out of some anti-AI ideology. I use LLMs daily. I just don't understand why we need to pay $8,000 for a robot that does exactly two tasks, takes up space in the house, uses power, and needs updates and repairs. At $15/hr, $8000 is 533 hours. So you are only breaking even if you get more than 22 full days of human folding labor (not the actual, slower time it takes the robot) during the useful life of the machine (probably 2-3yr max since it relies on backend supervision like a waymo). ChatGPT estimates that a human could fold about 27,000 shirts over 533 work hours.
- camel_gopher 3mo agoThey’ve had two of the Isaac 0 bots at the laundromat down the street from me for months. I’ve been impressed watching them evolve.
- xarope 3mo agoare you allowed to video them to see whether they can actually do a good job?
- nelox 3mo agoNo stairs, no go.
- SirMaster 3mo agoNumber five is alive!
- stubish 3mo agoHopefully they can pull this off. Aged care is already a problem in many countries, and getting worse with an aging population and lack of workers such as cleaners. Even just laundry could keep people living in their own homes for a few extra years.
- joe_the_user 3mo agoI think the first to use such home robots will have is people who can do the tasks but simply don't want to be bothered. The aged, infirm and disabled are going to need real people for company and to deal with any crises the infirm might have. And since the real people will be there and paid for anyway, the state is unlikely to pay for robots as a quality of life improvement (they'd pay for them if they removed the caregiver but that complete removal will science fiction for a while). As an example, I work taking care of a partly paralyzed man. He's tried an exoskeleton, believes it would help him a lot but can't afford the many thousands of dollars it would cost. The state pays for 18-hours/day care which is tens of thousands of dollars a month but they have to pay that.
- EagnaIonat 3mo agoSeems like something for people with more money than sense. If you could afford to drop money on this, odds on you can get a weekly maid who will do it for a fraction of the price. Watching the videos, they have the cleanest kids in that house. The ability to move pillows 4 inches is just blowing my mind.
- fragmede 3mo agoThe practicalities of it work out though. The same way the car replaced the horse and carriage, not having to deal with those messy biologics, means that it becomes a reliable dependable thing in a way that a human maid, with a human life outside of work, just simply isn't, no matter how hard the maid tries.
- pkulak 3mo agoThose folding clothes clips are the best: - The robot dragging one corner over itself into a sloppy mess. - Cut. - It’s perfectly folded.
- mDyJzDPmBdG 3mo agoSomehow it makes me irrationally angry that it is moving so slow, despite knowing it is trying its best.
- aliasxneo 3mo agoThe last time I saw one of these things being promoted I found out all of the "demos" on YouTube had some dude sitting in a closest with a VR headset controlling the whole thing.
- andsoitis 3mo ago> with teleoperation assistance Privacy nightmare. Bunch of random, low-paid operators looking around inside my home. No thanks!
- ImPostingOnHN 3mo agoNot just looking, this robot has write access to your house too
- imp0cat 3mo agoIs that really a concern? Pretty much any robovac nowadays has a camera and a wireless connection to the cloud and nobody seems to care.
- elil17 3mo agoThe difference is between the possibility someone might look and the guarantee that they are looking.
- xienze 3mo agoJust because a large percentage of the population either lacks the ability to understand why it's bad to have a livestream of your home being sent to China or simply doesn't care doesn't mean it's not a problem. Second, for robot vacuums you can flash them with Valetudo, a completely local control interface. The robots even run a custom DNS server that prevents them from ever phoning home.
- andsoitis 3mo ago> nobody seems to care. I don't care if nobody else cares, but I care. If someone crafted a home/garden robot that is fully autonomous using local AI or something like that then I'd be interested.
- xpct 3mo agoI find the operator point of view equally horrifying. Likely, they will run an OCR scan to blur any text seen through the cameras. Also likely, they would run a vision model classifying identifiable information: people walking past, hanged photos or even paintings, TV screens, maybe even the view outside the window? For safety purposes, I imagine it's also worth identifying handheld tools such as knives, bats, etc., all done so the operator risks are minimized. Fair enough, and I'm not arguing against that, there's just something distasteful about the operator having to walk around in a largely obscured, muted camera feed, looking for traces of underwear scattered around the house.
- azinman2 3mo agoDoesn’t seem to handle stairs. This assumes a large 1 story house?
- andsoitis 3mo agoCan it climb stairs?
- emil-lp 3mo agoNot a single frame showing the robot grabs anything. Cut scene aaaand folded! It's like magic.
- danpalmer 3mo ago> Handles loaded hampers What does it mean "handles"? It doesn't say it puts on a wash, but that's what I'd want. I can only assume they're vague because it doesn't do anything useful. > Makes beds A robot the height of a child makes a double bed with sheet, duvet, and pillows? I highly doubt it could reach. > Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks. That's a lot of words to say "a person will drive it around your home". What sort of insurance do they have for that person breaking something in your home? What audit trail do they have for the operators?
- Dig1t 3mo ago>What sort of insurance do they have for that person breaking something in your home? Probably just make the user accept a license agreement saying they accept the risk? I suspect most people would accept the risk something might get broken if it means they no longer need to clean their house.
- amanaplanacanal 3mo agoNot if the broken thing is a pet or toddler. And the amount of actual cleaning this thing appears to do is tiny.
- giarc 3mo agoWhat if it breaks something and you still need to clean your house? This thing does not look like it's going to much of anything successfully.
- danpalmer 3mo agoThe competition here is hiring a cleaner. Cleaners are insured. And it's even more than that, it only does a very few jobs, so we're talking a total of <5m of human time per day that it currently automates.
- smw 3mo agoI'm not defending anything about this, but it does have a telescoping torso so it can get to 'human height' when needed.
- akssri 3mo agoThis seems to be a redux of the 1x play (which was panned across the internet after the WSJ review). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so The hardware for these machines have been capable of household tasks for atleast 2 decades. Here's PR1 cleaning up a room, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7JH3UWO6I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7JH3UWO6I0 The issue is not even teleop as a product. The issue none of these companies talk about is one of state-reset. Even a teleop-ed robot comes nowhere near the dexterity of a human - as the Joanna Stern review of 1x shows: 10 mins to load a dishwasher, 5 mins to get a glass of water, body coming the way of a fridge door, irrecoverable breakdowns every 30 mins... Consider what happens if it drops some glassware or spills liquids on a carpet in addition (or worse does something stupid with the kitchen appliances). The teleop guy in Phillipines or India can't hop on a plane to fix this. This 'environment reset' problem is at the core of RL - there are no solutions for this yet, only workarounds.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3mo ago>> This seems to be a redux of the 1x play (which was panned across the internet after the WSJ review). For a moment I thought it was the same company. >> This 'environment reset' problem is at the core of RL - there are no solutions for this yet, only workarounds. That, and generalisation. A year or so back Aloha made huge waves but teleoperation doesn't solve the fundamental limitation of RL, that you have to train anew for every new environment or task.
- Y_Y 3mo agoImagine the enhanced Evil Maid attacks your could peform
- hamburgererror 3mo agoCan't wait to see the first horror movies about home robots
- MagicMoonlight 3mo ago[dead]
- tauntz 3mo agoFor some reason, reminds me of Cassandra: https://www.netflix.com/title/81621534 https://www.netflix.com/title/81621534. Maybe it's the gripping fingers or the way it rolls around the house in the demo video..
- utopiah 3mo ago/me gets tempted then looks at his Roomba gathering dust, on itself, for years now. It's great in theory. I hate chores... but those things don't work. They work-ish in some ideal cases but a house, even a sorted one, is a mess. You have cables, clothes on the floor, etc. Cleaning up is a menial task but it's not a trivial one, both mechanically and cognitively speaking. It won't work.
- jonplackett 3mo agoBearing in mind even competent human cleaners often do a mediocre job tidying up I cannot possibly see how this robot could even begin to be useful.
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo agoIt would work, if they could simplify the problem space. Install rails on the ceiling and pic and place from there..
- utopiah 3mo agoTrue, basic barely noticeable adjustments for a normal home.
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo agoBetter than- ups - i wrapped another cord around my tracks- and ripped a appliance +socket from the wall.. or spend thousands making my home robot-ready.
- jonplackett 3mo ago$8000 up front + $100 a month Assuming it lasts maybe 4 years that’s $61 a week. So you could just hire a human cleaner to come once a week and have them do a way better job. Or if you prefer to compare to the subscription price of $450 a month you can now have your human cleaner come twice a week
- pj_mukh 3mo agoExcept this is a daily/nightly service? Atleast in my home, it’s the daily cleanup that’s operationally grating with babies and toddlers. The weekly/monthly deep cleans are downright fun.
- jonplackett 3mo agoWanna come do my monthly deep clean?
- chakintosh 3mo agoFrom the looks of it, you're gonna need one robot per floor. On the one hand, it's refreshing seeing a robot that's not a creepy humanoid, on the other, how is it gonna deal with steps and stairs ?
- inopinatus 3mo agoThat’s what they said about the Daleks, who still managed to suppress all other species and become supreme rulers of the universe.
- amarant 3mo agoMan the design of this thing! Looks like they raided an old Nintendo warehouse and found a moss-covered Robb! That might sound like a criticism to some, but rest assured it's meant as praise! Who wouldn't want a moss-covered Robb cleaning their house?
- manc_lad 3mo agolooks like someone increased the border-radius on Jonny 5
- jorisw 3mo ago> Practical and delightful robots, shipping today. ... > Deliveries to California begin in Fall 2026. Broader U.S. availability starting in 2027.
- thekhatribharat 3mo agoAt $450/month, that's the same hourly rate as India's Urban Company / Snabbit / Pronto instant help. So it's price-competitive even in India.
- pil0u 3mo agoTop comments discuss the price, the design, the tech, which is what I expect on HN of course. I do question: why? $8000 to pick up the laundry and fold clothes. Good god, is this what innovation and technology aspires to achieve in 2026?
- TrackerFF 3mo agoAt that price point, and for the limited value it delivers...I think this is aimed squarely at the upper middle-class people. Those that are rich enough to not feel any economic stress from dropping $8k at a two-trick pony, but not rich enough to have a full-time domestic cleaner. Probably also aimed at the tech conscious people.
- vrganj 3mo agoThis looks vaguely interesting, but not with remote brains. Make this local-only and I might bite. I do not want a giant chunk of metal and sensors controlled by some outside entity roaming around my home freely.
- TrackerFF 3mo agoSo here's the thing: Laundry isn't really the chore that eats up my time. It takes like a minute or two to move clothes from the basket to the machine, and seconds to turn it on. Same with moving them to the dryer afterwards. Same with easy tidying up. What takes time, however, is cleaning and making food.
- Traster 3mo agoLet me blow your mind. The reason laundry doesn't take much of your time is because we built a robot to do it for you and it already handles 99.99% of the job and it costs a couple hundred bucks and it's called a washing machine. This machine costs $8000 and is promising to solve the other 0.01% of the time spent on this job, and it's promising to solve 0.01% of that 0.01%.
- frb 3mo agoPut a maid's uniform on it and looks almost like Rosey for the Jetsons (1962): https://thejetsons.fandom.com/wiki/Rosey https://thejetsons.fandom.com/wiki/Rosey Now honest question: How is all of that Daily Reset and Laundry stuff going to work if you have stairs and multiple floors?
- Traster 3mo agoThis is another industry that seems to me a lot like the AI glasses. It's that sweet spot of being extremely difficult to make work, whilst simultaneously offering almost nothing of value. It's actually striking that what they're promising it can do is almost nothing, and that it still won't be able to do what they claim. "Folds and puts clothes away" - ok, can I see any video of it taking clothes out of a washing machine (it can't), folding them, identifying where the clothes should go and then putting them there, and for example, opening a wardrobe and putting the clothes into the right place - possibly underneath other stuff that's already in there.
- imdsm 3mo agoCan it vacuum for me? Change the bedding? Can I put it to work in a blacksmith shop? Can it live outside and have the task of picking up leaves from the garden one by one until it finally breaks and causes The Android Uprising?
- 51Cards 3mo agoSo much of housing in my area is high density now taking the form of row housing with multiple levels. Other homes have laundry in the basement, bedrooms on a second level. Sadly Isaac isn't going to be as useful if you have stairs.
- crnkofe 3mo agoWhile I find robots cool they just don't literally "fit" in an average flat or house I lived in majority of my life. In order to squeeze one more member into your average household the lil thing needs to justify refurbishing the entire place so it can actually operate there without being a nuisance. Reminds of how my relative spent quite a bit of time making sure an old house being renovated was flat enough so automatic vacuum cleaner could traverse room to room without getting stuck. A humanoid robot is larger still. I can see them being adopted by businesses first though.
- cma 3mo agoIt doesn't need to have a sleeping surface or stay sprawled out when it isn't in use. It could bunch up into a little ball and fit in the corner of your ceiling. And it doesn't need to be the size of an adult to do most household stuff, some of the unitree ones are really short in stature, a foldable step stool for reaching upper cabinets or changing lightbulbs is probably enough. A bigger issue is whether it can really be as safe, not trip over wires, throw the baby in the trashcan, start a fire trying to make a cup of coffee and that kind of thing. Beyond accidents, lots of companies are talking about hooking these up to LLMs for planning that have horror movies in their training sets.
- Schiendelman 3mo agoThe ones with wheels are going to trip over everything. The moment a company has enough functional use cases for one of these that it's not limited to one floor of your house, that version will be bipedal and not trip.
- cma 3mo agoBy bunch up in a ball I just mean assume the fetal position when powered off, not wheels. They wouldn't have to take up more space in house than a large piece of travel luggage on a shelf.
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
- lai 3mo agoYou guys fold laundry?
- suyash 3mo agoThere you go, all your privacy gone right in the hands of these companies!
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- stevepotter 3mo agoIt's inevitable that someone will build a good robot to do these mundane chores. But is that a good thing? I vacuum every night and during that I get some great thinking done. If I had a robot vacuum, I can said with certainty I would make good use of that time.
- moktonar 3mo agoAnd so it begun.. Jokes aside does anybody else notice the eerie similarities with gray aliens?
- waltbosz 3mo agoIt reminded me of ET
- dtagames 3mo agoI don't think this or the other competitor announced last year will ever ship, or if they do, they'll quickly go out of business. There's no real product there.
- krunck 3mo ago"Is Isaac 1 teleoperated? Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks." Offline and autonomous or never in my house.
- joelthelion 3mo agoPrivacy aside, who wouldn't want their $8,000 cloud device abruptly shut down when Weave Robotics decides to pivot?
- weird-eye-issue 3mo agoCompletely offline will literally never happen at least not in any sort of off-the-shelf consumer product maybe in some sort of niche projects down the line
- troglodytetrain 3mo agoso just a quick counterpoint ---> I played around with qwen 2.5 4B recently locally. An older model and a tiny model. Tested this model with optimized harness and it was good enough that it was able to complete (sometimes) a full job application flow for given json user data. All that to say, I think that there is a strong possibility that we will even just with llm tech, develop it enough that local efficient models are entirely sufficient on their own to be able to drive basic robot 'harness'. But we almost certainly will not be seeing that as the product from the corporations because they desperately want and need that data about you, for the same reason many tv (lcd/etc) companies make more money from 'ads' then from selling the tvs.
- weird-eye-issue 3mo agoThat's great but there's a huge difference between a llm and a robot doing chores in your house
- haywalk 3mo agoI’d disagree with this. As local models and compute improve, I can definitely see something like this becoming doable offline in the next decades. In the meantime, at the very least, I would never use something like this unless I could bring my own API/cloud provider so that my data isn’t being handled by the vendor. Also teleoperation is a huge no go for me.
- dreamcompiler 3mo ago"Constantly improving" This means "constant forced software updates with the potential to brick the product." Just like Nest. Also likely: Inadequate security so your robot becomes a node in a residential VPN or a botnet. Or some hacker takes over your robot to scope out the interior of your house and sells that info to burglars on the darknet. Or to ICE. And you know what cannot be improved with software? Sensors. Like the kind in its fingertips that almost certainly are not good enough to allow it to fold laundry reliably.
- solarity_studio 3mo ago"Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks." I'll pass lol
- YeGoblynQueenne 3mo ago>> Laundry and tidying are valuable because they recur, generate messy edge cases and create training data. They are also privacy-sensitive and physically variable in ways that robot demos tend to hide. It's the WISYWYG model of AI: when you watch a video of a (usually humanoid) robot folding laundry, tying shoelaces, hanging shirts etc, it's hard to appreciate the specificity of the observed performance. Which is extreme: a robot folding a t-shirt can only fold that one t-shirt in the video unless it's been explicitly trained to fold... another one. You need to train for every single t-shirt, every single shoe whose laces you want to tie up etc [1]. It's hard to believe because we expect a humanoid that can fold one t-shirt to be able to fold any t-shirt and usually also many if not all other kinds of clothing. But that's not how it works with robots, or in any case their AI. Hence the need to teleoperate. Btw, no, Transformers have not yet revolutionised the field [2]. As to "fake it 'till you [have enough data to train a super-capable AI and] make it" that's the same bet made by Tesla and its autopilot, and there's still not enough data for a safe/ level-4/5 self-driving car, despite all the cars that Tesla has sold. Nor, dear reader, are Waymo robotaxis level 5 yet (despite them being apparently much safe than anyone else's SDCs). >> Beds, made. Pillows, blankets, kids' and pets' toys, shoes, back where they belong. No way modern AI can figure out where "kids' and pets' toys, shoes" belong. As if there's such a thing anyway. >> With Laundry Flow, Isaac 1 goes beyond folding, finding and picking up dirty clothes and handling loaded hampers. I put my dirty laundry in a plastic bug under a kitchen cupboard. Will Isaac 1 be able to deal with it? :angel eyes: ___________________ [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/02/a-revolution-in-how-robots-learn https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/02/a-revolution-i... Check out the bit where the reporter asks "If I gave it my shoe (...) would it totally fail?". [2] Mac Schwager: How General are Generalist Robot Policies? https://youtu.be/C4NQNeSO2vs?si=7J3Is_WyZc3L0lQk https://youtu.be/C4NQNeSO2vs?si=7J3Is_WyZc3L0lQk
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