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

weaverobotics.com · Read Story HN original

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

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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.

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.
Can't wait for the Uber version, where anyone with five minutes to spare can fold your laundry from their home.
Holy 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.
Or 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.
Gross.
We'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.
I think (hope) the poster who suggested that was being sarcastic, although it's hard to tell anymore!
The 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.
The oligarchs just have people to come do these tasks.

The target audience is the “regular-rich bourgeoisie”.

That's an ever-dwindling section of the population. Middle class and upper middle class is going away, we're very clearly heading towards ultra-polarization.
For some reason I always get pushback for pointing it out, but we are very quickly heading towards a bifurcated world like Elysium, possibly minus the space station, where a tiny ultra-rich class lives in luxury while physically separated and protected from billions who live in squalor. We're producing everything needed to build and enforce that world!
Don't worry, Musk is working on the Space Station part ...
So, we'll have Elysium minus the space station..
The meek shall inherit the Earth… but not the moon.
That's a Patton Oswalt bit; "no, haha, the meek shall inherit the earth, that's right. we're going to Mars. Bye!"
How is it worse compared with workers that are currently employed by the oligarch class? It's not like they don't have people doing menial work for them right now. And automation of menial work is a good thing!
Do you think the current AI automated menial work and left only the fun parts? It seems like the opposite, it took any fun from coding and left the drudgery of debugging code one didn't write intact.
Alex Rivera's 2008 movie Sleep Dealer is not without flaws, but it left quite an impression on me. I watched it it after seeing it recommended here in a comments thread on an article about military drone operators, I should probably watch it again with fresh eyes.

EDIT: Jeez, it looks like that's an 11 years old thread. Time does indeed fly.

EDIT 2: The source for the claim is paywalled, but this is how the Cultural impact chapter of the movie's Wikipedia page closes:

> In 2025, Rivera noted that a tech CEO claimed the film had been an inspiration for his company to employ a remote labour force in the Global South in order to operate robots in the Global North, and that the film has been used in pitch decks for various start-ups.

... once again bringing to mind the "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus" meme.

Nah. 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.
Tele-operation through a video feed(?) inside my home. Yeah that sounds pretty creepy
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.
They’re also much less likely to film their activities and upload it to the Internet…
Except these ai fucks are trying to put cameras on all such labor to train future world models and businesses are okay with it since they get paid for doing nothing extra. So yeah they can manage stairs but they might also be recording everything they do
Use an independent cleaner. My cleaning lady is a great cleaner, but she can barely manage her cellphone, so she's not training AIs.
Can you imagine all the customer support calls asking why it keeps showing up next to the shower?
> 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.

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?

Because your sex slave uses teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion?
That's gonna be a bonus for some people.
Is "task completion" an euphemism for "happy ending"?
The cylinder must not be harmed.
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..

> 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.

Separate people are easier to control, collective action is anathema to the ruling class.
A robot babysitter sounds like a suggestion made by somebody who doesn't have kids.
> 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.

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.

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.
So 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.
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.

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.
Honestly the Indian worker teleoperating the robot is probably also just a middle aged lady trying to make an honest living.
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.

Thanks! we've made that the main link and put the submitted link in the toptext.
No legs? Call it what it is: Dalek
Indeed - I look forward to the spa version of this that runs around yelling "Exfoliate!, Exfoliate!" : )
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 ?
> a Weave specialist

Lol. Folding engineer.

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

I wonder how this thing would hold up against a dog
RadioShack where are you, you should be selling these.
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.
Entomophobia/arachnophobia is far too common for giant bug-like robots in folks' bedrooms.
A couple hundred legs would be optimal.
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
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.

Real question: what about 3 legs? Is tripedal locomotion a viable compromise?
Real answer: how many animals can you think of with three legs?
Ah, so it’s impossible to make a robot unless it looks like an animal
Conversely one leg would be cheaper and lighter. I look forward to welcoming our hopping robot overlords!
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.
Teleoperation looks like a great business opportunity. Hire voyeurs for cheap and sell to exhibitionists.
Connecting voyeurs and exhibitionists is already a great business idea - don’t know why we need to add robots to the mix.
That business idea is already taken. It’s OnlyFans and it has more revenue than a top 10 company on the US stock market.
This will clean a home while the owner is away and be a teledildonics platform while they're home.
Forget voyeurs, operators will scan for valuables and sell that data along with owner schedule for some extra money on the side.
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.

They charge you for the privilege of folding your own laundry. Brilliant.
But you would also be getting paid. Literally arbitrage laundering.
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

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

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

They can always sell them to SpaceX, those guys have lots of money.
yeah, the production lines are in Reno, NV
So you will have low-paid Africans from 3rd world countries tele-operating a robots in rich peoples houses doing chores?
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.
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.
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the way it peeks over the couch in the landing page video :'D