Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries

https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-1

by ryanmerket • 21 days ago

234 383 21 days ago

https://runtimewire.com/article/weave-robotics-isaac-1-home-...

ceejayoz5• 21 days 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• 21 days ago

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.

throw3108225• 21 days ago

Can't wait for the Uber version, where anyone with five minutes to spare can fold your laundry from their home.

coffeebeqn• 21 days ago

Tele-operation through a video feed(?) inside my home. Yeah that sounds pretty creepy

arcticbull2• 21 days ago

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.

throwitaway222• 21 days ago

Can you imagine all the customer support calls asking why it keeps showing up next to the shower?

piokoch• 21 days ago

Think of 90 y.o. lonely people who can't care less about some company seeing the interior of their house. Surely, it is a risk, but being without any help and assistance.

steveBK1232• 20 days ago

It'll be about a week before the first reported incident of some operator sending it into bathroom/bedroom while occupied to watch.

stubish8• 21 days 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• 21 days ago

If I'm gonna be an early adopter and give them such valuable training data, they should at least give me stock options

Schiendelman17• 20 days ago

I think they're giving you the robot at half price.

conductr7• 21 days ago

Given 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_user2• 21 days ago

The robot has a two pronged gripper. I wonder what teleoperating that to do complex tasks would be like.

energy1232• 20 days ago

It's not a bad business idea, but has dystopian vibes. The human doesn't have to travel to the job site, they don't need to be paid a wage that allows them to exist in an expensive city, and they can watch N screens simultaneously, intervening only when needed. Maybe 1 OOM greater throughput per human-hour. The human teleoperator is also valuable non-public training data, which is part of the learning flywheel. That training data can be sold or kept as a private moat.

Schiendelman17• 20 days ago

Your robotic vacuums and lawnmowers are at a much lower price point that can't afford to run an LBM or computer vision to learn how to do a good job. Because those tasks are too specialized, it's unlikely anyone would pay $8000 for one that did a great job, but the technology is totally there.

The key is when the robot can use all the same tools you can, the generalist robot has a value high enough to pay for this technology.

greggsy2• 21 days ago

The 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• 21 days 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

wartywhoa232• 21 days 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!

npodbielski• 21 days ago

How? If something like that would happen robots would be disabled in 5 minutes.

xarope3• 21 days ago

I feel like this is the sort of thing William Gibson should write...

beAbU2• 21 days ago

Oh 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_mukh3• 21 days ago

Do 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• 21 days ago

The 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.

danmaz742• 21 days ago

How much does the monthly subscription cost?

alias_neo• 21 days ago

$449

ActionHank2• 21 days ago

Every 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.

aspenmartin3• 20 days ago

Curious why you feel they won’t get the tech down? I think these products are all data plays right now.

giarc3• 20 days ago

I 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• 20 days ago

They 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.)

nh23423fefe• 21 days ago

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?

ifdefdebug2• 21 days ago

Because your sex slave uses teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion?

ceejayoz5• 21 days ago

That's gonna be a bonus for some people.

dvh• 21 days ago

Is "task completion" an euphemism for "happy ending"?

pseudony• 21 days ago

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..

rvnx2• 21 days ago

https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Robosexuality

Could it become true ?

Well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_fetishism we live in the future already

throw3108225• 21 days ago

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.

ambicapter• 21 days ago

Separate people are easier to control, collective action is anathema to the ruling class.

UncleMeat• 21 days ago

A robot babysitter sounds like a suggestion made by somebody who doesn't have kids.

imtringued3• 21 days ago

I'm not seeing how this is different from a regular remote worker in terms of ethics?

ifdefdebug2• 21 days 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• 21 days ago

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.

0cf8612b2e1e• 21 days ago

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.

cootsnuck• 21 days ago

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.

Art96812• 21 days ago

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.

droidjj• 21 days ago

Product page: https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-1

Stitch4223• 21 days ago

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.

dang• 21 days ago

Thanks! we've made that the main link and put the submitted link in the toptext.

sandworm101• 21 days ago

No legs? Call it what it is: Dalek

twoWhlsGud• 21 days ago

Indeed - I look forward to the spa version of this that runs around yelling "Exfoliate!, Exfoliate!" : )

rvnx2• 21 days ago

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.

    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 ?

throw3108225• 21 days ago

a Weave specialist

Lol. Folding engineer.

fragmede6• 21 days ago

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?

TurdF3rguson2• 21 days ago

It's tricky but I'm betting it's possible to teleoperate sending all their jewelry to the philippines.

stubish8• 21 days 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.

imtringued3• 21 days ago

Why 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.

johnnyApplePRNG• 21 days ago

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.

johndenverscar• 21 days ago

I wonder how this thing would hold up against a dog

pupppet• 21 days ago

RadioShack where are you, you should be selling these.

para_parolu• 21 days ago

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.

ceejayoz5• 21 days ago

Entomophobia/arachnophobia is far too common for giant bug-like robots in folks' bedrooms.

throw3108225• 21 days ago

A couple hundred legs would be optimal.

05• 21 days ago

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

solid_fuel4• 21 days ago

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.

bensyverson2• 21 days ago

Real question: what about 3 legs? Is tripedal locomotion a viable compromise?

foxylad• 21 days ago

Conversely one leg would be cheaper and lighter. I look forward to welcoming our hopping robot overlords!

goobatrooba2• 21 days ago

I agree on the rest but don't see why it would be heavier. If you have more feet standing at any particular moment the load would be more distributed, i.e. movement should be easier with more legs (depending on leg weight of course).

shaewest• 21 days ago

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.

beau_g• 21 days ago

How about a centaur? - https://www.satyress.com/

regularfry• 21 days ago

Wheels in a different configuration solve the stairs problem. https://www.sacktrucks.co.uk/stair-climber-trucks/

jonfw• 20 days ago

wheels are so much simpler that it seems much easier and more cost efficient to solve the "transporting a wheeled robot up the stairs problem" than it does to go fully bipedal.

NDlurker2• 21 days ago

Teleoperation looks like a great business opportunity. Hire voyeurs for cheap and sell to exhibitionists.

m12k• 21 days ago

Connecting voyeurs and exhibitionists is already a great business idea - don’t know why we need to add robots to the mix.

pclmulqdq• 21 days ago

That business idea is already taken. It’s OnlyFans and it has more revenue than a top 10 company on the US stock market.

NDlurker2• 21 days ago

This will clean a home while the owner is away and be a teledildonics platform while they're home.

rasz• 21 days ago

Forget voyeurs, operators will scan for valuables and sell that data along with owner schedule for some extra money on the side.

hettygreen• 21 days ago

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.

loloquwowndueo• 21 days ago

They charge you for the privilege of folding your own laundry. Brilliant.

icepush• 21 days ago

But you would also be getting paid. Literally arbitrage laundering.

xpct3• 21 days ago

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

ryanmerket• 21 days ago

The post actually has important context that you won't find on the polished launch page.

ElijahLynn• 21 days ago

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...

joelthelion2• 21 days ago

Do we have any evidence that Tesla is actually working on manufacturing millions of robots?

fragmede6• 21 days ago

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.

kube-system• 21 days ago

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...

jppope• 21 days ago

yeah, the production lines are in Reno, NV

t1234s3• 21 days ago

So you will have low-paid Africans from 3rd world countries tele-operating a robots in rich peoples houses doing chores?

throw3108225• 21 days ago

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.

xpct3• 21 days ago

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.

outside1234• 21 days ago

[flagged]

kylehotchkiss• 21 days ago

the way it peeks over the couch in the landing page video :'D

netsharc2• 21 days ago

That reminds me of this 90's very very NSFF ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc0BUPRTX2Q

* Not safe for feminists

kyleee• 21 days ago

Is there an add on / subscription / higher tier where it joins in?

prepend4• 21 days ago

Better than local servants doing chores.

unselect59172• 21 days ago

Why is that better?

fugaziboutit• 21 days ago

AI = Actually Indenturedservantsfromthirdworldcountries

esafak• 21 days ago

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.

BizarroLand2• 21 days ago

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.

michelb• 21 days ago

I mean its a start to getting something to market? It just looks way behind the chinese models that are being delivered.

traverseda• 21 days ago

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.

prepend4• 21 days ago

Tesla operates vehicles for $100/month. I’m guessing whatever cloud ai this thing needs is less complicated and less money.

wat100002• 21 days ago

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.

yalogin• 21 days ago

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.

jimmygrapes• 21 days ago

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!

yladiz• 21 days ago

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.

jubilanti• 21 days ago

The world of computer vision is much bigger than multimodal LLMs. You'd run an ensemble of specialized models for 3d mapping, object classification, path validation, and so on. On a raspberry pi 5 8gb you can run what you need to self drive an RC car on an obstacle track at 10 FPS.

ACCount37• 21 days ago

Today, a lot of it is just integrated VLAs. End to end backprop covers a multitude of sins - a single integrated model stack in cross-attention beats "an ensemble of specialized models".

beAbU2• 21 days ago

So the play here is obvious, use the teleoperation as training data for a more general purpose AI controller.

Strong disagree: the play here is to use teleoperation, claim it's AI, make a shit-ton of money and cash out before the house of cards come tumbling down.

Balgair• 20 days ago

The cost is really tough to pin down, yeah.

The way one of their employees told me it to me as like a dishwasher.

Of course the dishwasher should be more expensive. When you add up the hours in labor saved and multiply by the hourly median wage, you get something in the $50k to $100k range.

But it's essentially just a sprinkler.

Ain't no one going to to pay the cost of a new BMW for a dishwasher.

Same thing here for the laundro-bots. Their competition isn't against the time saved for a person to do it themselves. The competition is a maid that does your whole house for $70.

shellfishgene• 20 days ago

It may actually be cheaper to have the robot remotely operated all the time from some low cost country...

bigfishrunning• 20 days ago

Of course the dishwasher should be more expensive. When you add up the hours in labor saved and multiply by the hourly median wage, you get something in the $50k to $100k range.

Except most dishwashers aren't competing against people washing dishes by hand and making the hourly median wage, they're competing against other dishwashers

YeGoblynQueenne9• 20 days ago

> 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.

In practice most of the costs would be the teleoperation costs rather than AI inference.

zokier• 21 days ago

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

captn3m0• 21 days ago

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.

tencentshill• 21 days ago

That's fine. Like a robot lawnmower - if it does it every day, it doesn't need to be as fast as a person.

BizarroLand2• 21 days ago

I would be happy if it could put my clothes on hangers without teleoperation.

ziofill• 21 days ago

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.

krupan• 21 days ago

Are these the same guys that were trashing airbnbs testing the robots?

JumpCrisscross3• 21 days ago

No, that was The Bot Company [1][2].

[1] https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/28/sf-startup-secretly-testin...

[2] https://www.bot.co/

tantalor• 21 days ago

The product specs are pretty light on details. Weight? Speed? Capabilities? How loud is it?

t1234s3• 21 days ago

This is like a demo iPhone 1 where Optimis will be the iPhone 17 Pro

prepend4• 21 days ago

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.

JumpCrisscross3• 21 days ago

Yup, not mentioning weight is problematic. I also want to understand pet safety.

jvm___• 21 days ago

-Phone notification-

Your chinchilla had finished the wash cycle.

SOLAR_FIELDS• 21 days ago

Yeah this piece of marketing got me:

Made to fit in every home, including yours.

Unless that home has stairs

levocardia3• 21 days ago

I have a startup idea: I will make the robot that ferries your laundry robot up and down the stairs.

Y_Y3• 21 days ago

A coming update will enable grappling hook operation

chakintosh3• 21 days ago

Not even stairs, looks like one step will defeat this $8000 robot.

CamouflagedKiwi• 21 days ago

Yeah I was thinking exactly this. Also I don't think it can reach my dryer.

I am happy this kind of thing is being worked on, I just don't think this is gonna be it - they really talk around what it does but "folding clothes" isn't enough. $8k to handle a complete laundry cycle (including ironing) might be interesting.

tibbon• 21 days ago

Soooo close, but I have a 4 floor house. Talk to me when it does stairs.

gpm2• 21 days ago

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.

cortesoft• 21 days ago

Robots are used extensively for commercial purposes, though.

gpm2• 21 days ago

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.

jasonfarnon• 21 days ago

I think they mean something like at laundromats. Or those large commercial laundry services should be using them behind the scenes.

dmix• 21 days ago

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.

stubish8• 21 days ago

I 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.

morpheuskafka2• 21 days ago

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.

But why would you pay thousands and store a clunky machine in your home for that? Either you don't care about the bed being made or not -- in which case just don't, its not essential -- or you'd have it made already in 30-60 seconds when you got up before you could even get the thing turned on.

Folding laundry is the same thing. It says 30-90 minutes, I assume for one wash load? A human couldn't possibly take more than 30 minutes. And a human with a folding board could do it in 5-10. So unless you do not care about laundry at all, it would drive you crazy to watch that machine blocking your hallway for over an hour slowly folding a single load.

Alternatively, a wash/dry/fold service will deliver them to your door not just folded, but neatly packed in dustproof bags. (This is a major life hack when packing for a trip btw.)

maxdo• 21 days ago

So that laundry task is not possible due to wheels at least in my house. You need to Cary this guy everywhere lol

tedggh• 21 days ago

It looks terribly depressed, lonely and sad.

wayeq• 21 days ago

at least we have that in common

the_sleaze_• 21 days ago

"The first 10 million [pounds of laundry] were the worst, after that everything went downhill"

- Marvin the household laundry bot

emsign• 21 days ago

I put my clothes into the clothes bin directly without using the floor as a temporary storage space.

Art96812• 21 days 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• 21 days ago

Or unlocking your doors while you’re on vacation. If there’s a way to operate it remotely then it will get operated remotely.

ryandrake5• 21 days ago

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.

SamuelAdams• 21 days ago

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.

storus2• 21 days ago

This looks like something from 80s sci-fi and far behind what Unitree has.

XorNot• 21 days ago

Honestly 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_• 21 days ago

That 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.

levocardia3• 21 days ago

I 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• 21 days ago

If it needs a remote hooman operator at any point, it's an absolute no go for me. Dead on arrival.

t1234s3• 21 days ago

This 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.

slashdave• 21 days ago

Thank goodness! That pillow has been in the wrong place on my sofa for weeks and I didn't know what to do!

thelastgallon• 21 days ago

Whats 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

proee• 21 days ago

Could work well in vacation rentals where items in the house are well defined with very specific put back places.

AussieWog933• 21 days ago

HN 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• 21 days ago

Selling 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.

AussieWog933• 21 days ago

Their plan is surely to collect huge amounts of training data and replace the human workers.

BloondAndDoom2• 21 days ago

That’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.

morpheuskafka2• 21 days ago

It'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• 21 days ago

They’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.

xarope3• 21 days ago

are you allowed to video them to see whether they can actually do a good job?

nelox• 21 days ago

No stairs, no go.

SirMaster• 21 days ago

Number five is alive!

stubish8• 21 days ago

Hopefully 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_user2• 21 days ago

I 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• 21 days ago

Seems 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.

fragmede6• 21 days ago

The 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• 21 days ago

Those folding clothes clips are the best:

- The robot dragging one corner over itself into a sloppy mess. - Cut. - It’s perfectly folded.

mDyJzDPmBdG• 21 days ago

Somehow it makes me irrationally angry that it is moving so slow, despite knowing it is trying its best.

aliasxneo• 21 days ago

The 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.

andsoitis4• 21 days ago

with teleoperation assistance

Privacy nightmare. Bunch of random, low-paid operators looking around inside my home. No thanks!

ImPostingOnHN• 21 days ago

Not just looking, this robot has write access to your house too

imp0cat• 21 days ago

Is 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• 21 days ago

The difference is between the possibility someone might look and the guarantee that they are looking.

xienze• 21 days ago

Just 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.

andsoitis4• 20 days 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.

xpct3• 21 days ago

I 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.

zajio1am• 20 days ago

It is not really much different than paying for cleaning, the cleaning person also sees inside of house.

andsoitis4• 20 days ago

they don't record everything and store it on a company's servers somewhere where it is used for who knows what.

as an aside, a human that I hire can do a much wider range of tasks than a robot PLUS it is income for a family.

azinman2• 21 days ago

Doesn’t seem to handle stairs. This assumes a large 1 story house?

andsoitis4• 21 days ago

Can it climb stairs?

emil-lp• 21 days ago

Not a single frame showing the robot grabs anything.

Cut scene aaaand folded! It's like magic.

danpalmer3• 21 days 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• 21 days 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.

amanaplanacanal2• 20 days ago

Not if the broken thing is a pet or toddler. And the amount of actual cleaning this thing appears to do is tiny.

giarc3• 20 days ago

What 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.

danpalmer3• 20 days ago

The 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• 20 days ago

I'm not defending anything about this, but it does have a telescoping torso so it can get to 'human height' when needed.

danpalmer3• 20 days ago

But it can't lean and balance. Making a bed requires reaching potentially 1m across a surface that might also be 0.5m high. That requires balance, humans can bend and balance like that very naturally, but that's hard for a robot, and this doesn't look like it has the manoeuvrability to achieve it.

amanaplanacanal2• 20 days ago

Down under "What does it do" it says:

Depending on the home in question, Isaac 1 may be able to help with even more within each feature area (such as loading and unloading clothes from washer/dryer machines)

So evidently that isn't included in Laundry flow. Maybe "handles" just means picking up the hamper and moving it to the washing machine? I wonder if it requires a specific hamper for this to work.

Honestly this thing looks pretty useless.

akssri• 21 days ago

This 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

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

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.

YeGoblynQueenne9• 20 days 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_Y3• 21 days ago

Imagine the enhanced Evil Maid attacks your could peform

hamburgererror• 21 days ago

Can't wait to see the first horror movies about home robots

tauntz• 21 days ago

For some reason, reminds me of Cassandra: https://www.netflix.com/title/81621534. Maybe it's the gripping fingers or the way it rolls around the house in the demo video..

utopiah2• 21 days 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.

jonplackett3• 21 days ago

Bearing 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.

21asdffdsa122• 21 days ago

It would work, if they could simplify the problem space. Install rails on the ceiling and pic and place from there..

utopiah2• 21 days ago

True, basic barely noticeable adjustments for a normal home.

jonplackett3• 21 days 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_mukh3• 21 days ago

Except 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.

jonplackett3• 21 days ago

Wanna come do my monthly deep clean?

chakintosh3• 21 days ago

From 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• 21 days ago

That’s what they said about the Daleks, who still managed to suppress all other species and become supreme rulers of the universe.

amarant• 21 days ago

Man 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• 20 days ago

looks like someone increased the border-radius on Jonny 5

jorisw• 21 days ago

Practical and delightful robots, shipping today.

...

Deliveries to California begin in Fall 2026. Broader U.S. availability starting in 2027.

thekhatribharat• 21 days ago

At $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• 21 days ago

Top 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?

TrackerFF2• 21 days ago

At 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.

vrganj2• 21 days ago

This 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.

TrackerFF2• 21 days ago

So 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.

Traster2• 21 days ago

Let 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• 21 days ago

Put a maid's uniform on it and looks almost like Rosey for the Jetsons (1962): 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?

Traster2• 21 days ago

This 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• 20 days ago

Can 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?

theplumber2• 20 days ago

For 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.

51Cards• 20 days ago

So 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• 20 days ago

While 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.

cma2• 20 days ago

It 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.

Schiendelman17• 20 days ago

The 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.

test6554• 20 days ago

People who have the disposable income to buy $8,000 personal robotic assistants or $20,000 1X Neo are a lot more likely to live in larger spaces. I've got about 1,000 sqft per occupant in my home. Plenty of room for a C-3PO or Johnny 5.

projektfu• 20 days ago

Can Johnny 5 get between the sofa and coffee table without needing to move furniture?

lai• 20 days ago

You guys fold laundry?

suyash• 20 days ago

There you go, all your privacy gone right in the hands of these companies!

stevepotter• 20 days ago

It'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• 20 days ago

And so it begun..

Jokes aside does anybody else notice the eerie similarities with gray aliens?

waltbosz• 20 days ago

It reminded me of ET

dtagames• 20 days ago

I 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• 20 days 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.

weird-eye-issue2• 20 days ago

Completely 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• 20 days ago

so 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.

haywalk• 20 days ago

I’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.

dtj1123• 20 days ago

Believe it or not, I'm actually capable of operating completely offline. So there you have it.

YeGoblynQueenne9• 20 days ago

Look, I mean, would you really object to a human cleaner showing up every day and putting away your laundry?

If the answer is "no" then what's the difference if the human cleaner is not physically present but instead teleoperating a robot?

I mean at least the robot won't ever need to use the loo. I'm a bit fastidious like that but I don't like it when strangers sit on my loo.

(Friends too. Why can't we have a robotic potty that follows visitors around? OK, I get it... )

shostack• 20 days ago

Generally when people have a house cleaner they know who it is and have some form of relationship with them that establishes a baseline of trust. That would not exist here.

robhlt• 20 days ago

It's not really the same unless the human cleaner also wears a gopro to record and archive their entire cleaning session for later review (and potential sale to data brokers when the cleaning company wants more money).

0xffff2• 20 days ago

First of all, yes, I would object although I've debated whether I could get over it for myself. But it's a moot point because my partner would absolutely _never_ put up with it. And that's assuming that the human cleaner doesn't show up with a go-pro and an ill defined policy about where the video from the go-pro is going and what it will be used for

rurp• 20 days ago

Scale matters. Just because I'm fine with one cop following one suspicious person around doesn't mean I'm fine with the government spying on all citizens at all times.

Same thing for robotics companies. A single cleaner is uploading ~zero information to a myriad of databases and training sets. An internet connected robot is almost certainly going to store immense amount of data and do god-knows-what with it.

joelthelion2• 20 days ago

Privacy aside, who wouldn't want their $8,000 cloud device abruptly shut down when Weave Robotics decides to pivot?

dreamcompiler• 20 days 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• 20 days 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

YeGoblynQueenne9• 20 days 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-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

Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries

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