The cleaning robot that came to my building last month was already a bit of a spectacle. It arrived in a blue minivan, out of which it was helped by Weinzierl and another Tau employee. That’s when the robot encountered its first obstacle: the eight stairs leading up to the building’s front door. I’d come down to greet Weinzierl and the robot, so I had a front-row seat to its struggles with my steps. It climbed as if it were drunk. Each successful step was as likely as not to be followed by a stumbling backward stagger that erased all its progress—though, impressively, it never entirely lost its footing.
When I later discussed my experience with Weinzierl, she explained that the robot sometimes walks strangely because it is operated remotely from Tau’s headquarters, and the short signal transmission delay can affect its coordination. “The amount of work and time that we spend just optimizing, for example, timings and connectivity is crazy,” she said.
Inside, the carpeted staircase leading up to my apartment defeated the robot entirely, and Weinzierl had to lug it up the last few steps. This, it turned out, was not typical. As the robot cleaned, it repeatedly stalled out, something Weinzierl attributed to it overheating in the unseasonably hot weather—until she heard from one of her colleagues that the heat had shut down not the robot but the equipment that its human controller was using to watch its progress through my apartment. Without remote assistance, the robot couldn’t clean, and so it, and Weinzierl, departed before my booked hour was up. (Back in September, Weinzierl or another Tau representative remained with the robot throughout its visit, but she says that’s no longer necessary.)
You can’t fault Tau on customer service, though. Weinzierl quickly emailed me to apologize, comp the visit, and offer me another on the house (minus whatever price I assign to my data privacy)—and that was all before I told her I was a journalist. I scheduled the next cleaning for about a month later, after a couple of trips out of town, and it went much more smoothly—the robot got up my stairs without much assistance, though still with the drunken stagger. In the hour it was there, it did a creditable job of cleaning my kitchen (though it didn’t brave the stove) and even saved me my most dreaded cleaning task, the toilet. That was its most impressive performance: Three times the head fell off its toilet cleaning wand, and three times it managed to reattach it by poking around with the handle until it made contact at just the right angle.
