SF startup is testing robots in Airbnbs, and trashing them, lawsuit claims

starkparker

so, so close to having people legitimately and earnestly start saying "we don't serve their kind here" while gesturing to humanoid robots

htrp

>Donovan alleges that employees of the Bot Company(opens in new tab) rented his home “under false pretenses” to conduct prototype testing on robots they’re training to do household chores. >A refrigerator shelf was cracked, and a broken glass or dish had been left in the garbage disposal. A wooden nightstand drawer was chipped. Cups and plates were in the wrong places. It looked like the furniture had been moved around. Not sure which one is worse, the fact that the bot can't actually do household chore or the fact that the humans can't clean it up.

gbgarbeb

$13,000 in damage you say? Where have I heard that number before... [1] Keep it real, Kyle. It doesn't seem like you learned anything from the failure of your last company. [1] https://weartv.com/news/local/report-pensacola-woman-charged...

fjni

> Founded by alums of Tesla and the autonomous vehicle company Cruise, the San Francisco startup has received hundreds of millions in venture capital funding and is valued at $2 billion Stop outsourcing the cost of your vision to the rest of society. Especially when it’s peanuts to you and meaningful to, in this case, the host of what they call an apartment and you seem to think is a test course.

TZubiri

Can any lawyer clear this up for me? If the company ends up having no commercial success and the lawsuits for damages rack up, can they just close the company file for bankruptcy and face no consequences? Or is there some civil or criminal risk to this behaviour?

JumpCrisscross

The only way to stop this is for charges to be brought against the employees who made the bookings under false pretenses.

deckar01

> He looked through a window and saw black cables taped to the walls. A man was typing on a laptop sitting next to what appeared to be a robot. This sounds a lot like criminal invasion of privacy. Edit: What are you downvoting? You can’t secretly watch Airbnb guests through a window you rented to them for the same reason you can’t put spy cameras in their bathroom.

866-RON-0-FEZ

Did the host leave them fresh-baked cookies and an open invitation to "hang out"?

nickvec

Pretty disgusting behavior. Total lack of respect for others property. The individuals should be named and shamed for participating rather than putting it under the umbrella of the Bot Company.

iknowstuff

The fact that this made it to the news cycle is indicative enough of the airbnb owner smelling money once they found out a robotics company is involved, regardless of the extent of damage/wear

solfox

Doubtful these clowns even have commercial insurance for these rentals. What a deceitful and dangerous way to build a business - to save (what?) a few thousand per rental?

jmyeet

This is just the most perfect Silicon Valley microcosm. How many startups work is they simply break the law. The gamble is that you can get big enough fast enough that you can then lobby for a change in the law before governments catch up. Uber and Airbnb are like the posterchildren for this. Taxi services are regulated. You can't run an illegal hotel in a residential area. Simple. So what we have here is another company who doesn't want to make a test kitchen or house. No, that's too expensive. So they'll instead use another startup to effectively steal a lab. It's layers upon layers of illegality, basically. So if this succeeds and this company creates waves of domestic robots, we can then start to imagine what the next layer is. Will somebody rent an Airbnb with domestic robots so it can then sublet those robots to somebody else or use them for tasks they weren't designed for?

maxbond

"Move fast and break other people's things."

jollyllama

It's an interesting approach to the fact that navigation in human spaces is very difficult to generalize, which is probably the main reason that robotics has lagged, say drones.