Osegi
Hardware·2 min read

Tuesday Labs VOXEL: A Headless Home Robot With a Face on Its Belly

VOXEL, a home robot from Tuesday Labs, has no head, ostrich-style knees and a face on its belly. It tidies, waters plants and remembers where you left things.

A boxy headless humanoid home robot with two arms, ostrich-style reversed knees and a glowing face on its torso.
Image: ギズモード・ジャパン
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Most humanoid robots copy the human body and end up with a blank face you can't read. Tuesday Labs' VOXEL takes the opposite route: it has no head at all, and its face sits on its belly.

VOXEL is a square box body with two arms and legs. The knees bend backwards, like an ostrich's. The face-like part on the torso shows expressions through moving light patterns in its "eyes". It is meant to tidy rooms, water plants and fetch things you ask for. It has good visual memory too, so if you ask where you left something, it tells you the last place it saw it.

Who is behind the VOXEL robot?

The company's female founder wanted a robot people would actually want in their home. Not a best friend, though. She wanted something closer to a moody cat that knows what it wants to do and just happens to share your room.

The designer spent 11 years making films at Pixar, so character design is familiar ground. The engineer worked almost 20 years as a technician on nuclear submarines. The programmer worked to remove awkward pauses between movements.

What can VOXEL do?

The robot has one mission: keep your home in top shape. Each hand has one degree of freedom and simply pinches and releases, like a clothes peg. The arms have seven degrees of freedom, enough to open doors and shelves and to grab towels and dishes when they work together.

The Z-shaped legs absorb shocks, and the reversed knees keep them from hitting furniture. A wide-angle camera and stereo RGB vision find objects without a head. The robot understands spoken commands and answers in various tones, though the demo video had no sound. Buttons on the body handle emergency stop, return to home position, volume and mode changes.

Price and availability

The first batch is limited and carries serial numbers. Pre-orders are open at about 3.2 million yen (roughly 20,000 dollars at current rates).

Apps worth a look

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Tags:tuesday labsvoxelhome robothumanoidrobotics

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