Most robots that want a place in your home show up dressed as people. Voxel arrives looking like a mustard-yellow filing cabinet on legs. He has terracotta arms, two pixel eyes set low on his front like buttons on a cardigan, and knees that bend backward. He’s the first robot from Tuesday Labs, a small robotics lab and design studio in New York City, and founder Ros Shinkle introduced him this week as a “droid butler.”
His job is the dull stuff. Putting things back where they live. Finding your keys. Watering the plants. His real selling point is something no spec sheet lists, though. He has a personality, and it was designed before almost anything else about him.
Somewhere between a person and a toaster
Shinkle spent years at Boston Dynamics on the team behind Spot’s robot arm, writing the software that decides how it grabs and places things. When she started Tuesday Labs, she went the other way from the human-shaped robots crowding the field right now. She told Dezeen the team “deliberately didn’t build a humanoid,” and kept Voxel small and boxy so his role reads at a glance: a droid butler, not a human one.
Early designs borrowed from lamps, chairs and briefcases, and the final character came out of work with Alonso Martinez, a former Pixar character designer. Our favorite idea in the whole project is Shinkle’s sliding scale. Put a human at one end and a toaster at the other. Every part of a believable robot, his eyes, his walk, his voice, should land at roughly the same spot between them. Drift too far toward human and he gets creepy. Too far toward toaster and he’s an appliance.
There’s a practical side too. If a robot looks about as capable as it really is, nobody walks away let down. A headless box with simple pincer grippers promises less than a humanoid with five-fingered hands, and that’s deliberate.
A gentleman in training, with a few fears
Tuesday Labs calls Voxel a gentleman in training. Shinkle told Fast Company he’s a little obsessive and a little anxious, and that he sometimes gets stuck on a task because he wants it just right. Also: “He’s afraid of water and the outdoors and sharp things.”
It sounds like a bit, and it is a little funny! But it’s also the strategy. Shinkle’s argument is that you’ll only trust a robot in your home if you can guess how it will react to something it has never seen, and a consistent character is what makes that guess possible. A robot who’s nervous around knives and puddles is a robot you can predict.
Animated first, then taught to walk
Most legged robots are tuned to walk as steadily as possible. Voxel was animated first. A former Pixar animator built 3D animations of him moving in character, and Tuesday Labs trains its motion models on those clips, so the real robot reproduces them while coping with gravity, tilted floors and the odd shove. It’s close to a research method called DeepMimic, published in 2018, where a simulated character learns to copy a reference animation and still get its job done.
The result is a robot that toddles. He sways at the hips. In the launch film he bobs along while a musician plays a digital wind instrument, which no home robot strictly needs to do, and which is the best moment in the film!
Shinkle has said the thing that made robots feel magical to her at Boston Dynamics was never lifelike eyes. It was the in-between moments, like a robot catching itself after a stumble, or pausing before it makes up its mind. To get those right, Tuesday Labs worked with illustrators, character designers and animators, among them Rebecca On, Alonso Martinez, Tommaso Pardini, Joe Haddad, Aram Pundik and KC Roeyer. The sketches are a treat.
What he’ll actually do
Tuesday Labs is starting with four jobs, and the copy on its site is half the fun. Home Reset is the big one, putting every stray thing back where it belongs (“Big messes make happy robots.”). Find means asking Voxel where your phone went and hearing where he last saw it. Fetch brings you the book, the drink, the keys. Tend covers the repeat chores, like watering the plants.
He learns where things live by scanning the house as he moves through it, which Shinkle compares to a Roomba with machine learning added. Cooking, laundry and childcare aren’t on the list at launch, though she sees him taking on laundry and dishes someday. When he’s done, he heads back to his dock to charge.
The object itself deserves a closer look. The shell is matte plastic, chosen to keep him light while still feeling like something well made, and Shinkle names five principles behind it: easy to live with, maximalist, simple, luxurious and playful. There’s even an all-white and grey version floating around, which turns him into a quieter, more serious fellow.
Every Voxel gets a number
Voxel’s estimated price is $20,000. A fully refundable $200 reservation holds a spot in the first production run, with US deliveries planned for 2028. Series-1 units are numbered in the order people reserve, and each owner’s number is printed right on the robot. The one tending the bonsai above wears 002.
Some honesty about where things stand. Tuesday Labs is a team of about seven people. The Voxel in the film is a prototype, the hardware may change a lot before it ships, and for now he does his chores with a mix of autonomy and teleoperation, meaning a person is sometimes at the controls. The first owners will help train his software at home. A good deal can happen between now and 2028.
Here’s the full launch film, a minute and a half long and worth every second.
If he does turn up at your door one day, keep him away from the sink. He’s a little nervous about water.
More robots we’ve fallen for: Microduck, the $399 duck that learns by falling over, Isaac, the laundry-folding robot, and Familiar Machines’ bear-dog companion. For the objects that shaped how we live, start with our design guide.
