Somebody finally built a robot butler, and the first thing they did was take off its head. Meet Voxel, the “gentleman in training” from New York startup Tuesday Labs. It walks on backward-bending legs, looks at you with pixel eyes that sit down near its belly, was animated with help from Pixar-style character designers and, according to Fast Company, is afraid of water, the outdoors and sharp objects. You can reserve one right now for $200. The full price is expected to be around $20,000, and deliveries are not planned until 2028. Interesting Engineering asked the obvious question in its Short: would you buy this thing?
What Voxel actually does
Tuesday Labs keeps the job list short and honest. Voxel Series-1 has four tricks: Home Reset (putting stuff back where it belongs), Find (tracking down the thing you lost), Fetch (bringing it to you) and Tend (watering your plants). As The Verge put it, it “won’t be making dinner or changing diapers.” That is fine. Most of us do not need a robot chef. We need someone to find the TV remote and stop the fern from dying again.
The hardware list reads like a real robotics project, not a render. Each arm has 7 degrees of freedom with fully actuated wrists, the grippers are simple 1-DOF pinchers, and the Z-shaped legs bend the opposite way from human knees so Voxel can raise and lower itself to reach a counter or the floor. It sees through stereo RGB cameras plus a wide-field camera, talks through what Tuesday Labs calls an Audio + Visual Communication Matrix and charges itself at a dock.
Why the face is on its stomach
There is no head. The torso is the head. The Verge describes the boxy body as doubling as one, with a little mouth and animated pixel eyes down near the waist, while the real cameras hide above them. Founder Ros Shinkle told Dezeen the team “deliberately didn’t build a humanoid,” calling Voxel “a droid butler, not a human butler.” Shinkle knows a thing or two about robots without faces. Before Tuesday Labs, Shinkle worked on the Spot arm at Boston Dynamics, the company that made robot dogs a household meme (we covered the Boston Dynamics SpotMini back in 2017).
Part Boston Dynamics, part Pixar
That is Fast Company’s headline, and it is the clever bit. Instead of programming every step, Tuesday Labs has animators create Voxel’s movements as 3D character animation first, then trains the robot to copy them with reinforcement learning, according to TechTimes. Tuesday Labs credits a group of character collaborators including former Pixar character designer Alonso Martinez. The result is a robot with a personality on purpose: polite, a little anxious and slightly obsessed with chores. “We don’t want him to feel like a toaster,” Shinkle told Dezeen. Mission accomplished. Toasters are not scared of the backyard.
Why build it at all? Shinkle gave Fast Company the most relatable answer in robotics: “We built the robot that we wanted to use… I’m messy. And I’m a roboticist.” Same, minus the roboticist part.
The fine print
- The $200 is a reservation, not an order. Tuesday Labs says it is fully refundable and gets applied to your final purchase. It is US only for now.
- $20,000 is an estimate. The reservation terms say final pricing gets confirmed before you actually order. For comparison, TechTimes notes the 1X NEO home humanoid is also pitched at $20,000.
- 2028 is a long way off. Tuesday Labs says deliveries are expected to begin in 2028, depending on production and where you live.
- It is still a prototype. The Short points out the hardware may change before delivery, and Dezeen reports Voxel currently runs on a mix of autonomy and teleoperation. Early owners are expected to help train it.
GadgetKing take
Voxel is the most charming home robot pitch we have seen this year, and that is exactly the strategy. A tiny team is betting that people will let a robot into the house if it feels like a nervous little character instead of a chrome security guard. Paying $20,000 for something that cleans up clutter and waters plants is a tough sell today, and a 2028 delivery date is an eternity in robot years. But $200 refundable to get in line for a headless butler who is scared of puddles? That is the cheapest conversation piece in tech. We just hope Voxel learns to find our car keys before it learns to find our credit card.
Sources: Tuesday Labs, Tuesday Labs reservations, The Verge, Fast Company, Dezeen and TechTimes. Video: Interesting Engineering. Images: Tuesday Labs.
More robots that want to move in: Isaac 1 home robot, the Unitree H2-X kung fu bodyguard and Hugging Face’s Microduck desk robot.
