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> 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.
Tele-operation through a video feed(?) inside my home. Yeah that sounds pretty creepy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I'm gonna be an early adopter and give them such valuable training data, they should at least give me stock options
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.
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
"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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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 ?
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.
> with teleoperation assistance
Privacy nightmare. Bunch of random, low-paid operators looking around inside my home. No thanks!
/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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
$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
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.
The product specs are pretty light on details. Weight? Speed? Capabilities? How loud is it?
"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.
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.
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.
"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
Those folding clothes clips are the best:
- The robot dragging one corner over itself into a sloppy mess. - Cut. - It’s perfectly folded.
Could work well in vacation rentals where items in the house are well defined with very specific put back places.
So that laundry task is not possible due to wheels at least in my house. You need to Cary this guy everywhere lol
Thank goodness! That pillow has been in the wrong place on my sofa for weeks and I didn't know what to do!
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..
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.
I put my clothes into the clothes bin directly without using the floor as a temporary storage space.
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.
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?
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?
And so it begun..
Jokes aside does anybody else notice the eerie similarities with gray aliens?
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.