Tau Robotics
A San Francisco startup renting out humanoid cleaning robots that people steer remotely.
Tau Robotics is a San Francisco company that in August 2026 opened an invite-only pilot letting residents hire humanoid robots to clean their homes for 30 dollars an hour. The machines cost around 50,000 dollars each, wear company uniforms and have names. They vacuum, wipe counters and take out the rubbish. They cannot climb stairs.
The important detail is that the robots are largely teleoperated: human staff at a central hub wear VR goggles, see through the robot’s cameras and steer it through the job, with onboard AI helping only with smaller movements. CEO Alexander Koch has said the company wants to reach a thousand cleanings a week in San Francisco by 2027. Roboticists have been openly sceptical that the machines are close to doing this on their own, with Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg putting reliable autonomous house cleaning roughly a decade away.