# Four minutes to fold a towel: teleoperated humanoids clean houses at 30 dollars an hour

> Start-up Tau Robotics sends remotely guided Unitree G1 robots to clean homes and offices, and uses the sessions to train its AI, MarketWatch reports.

Published on 2026-10-17

A robot took about four minutes to fold a towel, and just over a minute for a pair of jeans, MarketWatch journalist Christine Ji found. She nevertheless judged the mopping, vacuuming, surface cleaning and dusting to be carefully done.

Tau Robotics charges 30 dollars an hour per robot. The paid work helps it collect data to train its AI models for robots.

A pair of robots costs 60 dollars an hour. According to MarketWatch, Tau runs eight robots and has billed about 160 robot hours, spread over nearly 100 cleaning sessions.

Cleaning requires live video access, but customers can later ask for their data to be deleted, MarketWatch says. Otherwise, the footage, which is not blurred, is kept indefinitely to train the models.

## Sources

- [Humanoid.guide](https://humanoid.guide/tau-robotics-humanoids-clean-homes-for-30-an-hour-with-help/)

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