Humanoid
Flourish, a startup straddling San Francisco and Paris, is set to open sales for Flourish One, a $3,555 wheeled humanoid-style home robot aimed at busy parents. Early adopters can teach the robot new chores in under 30 minutes using only a smartphone, according to the company, which is positioning the device as a proving ground for practical domestic robotics rather than industrial work.
Most humanoid and mobile-manipulator startups are chasing factory or warehouse work, where environments are structured and data is plentiful. Flourish is deliberately taking on the messier challenge of the home. Founder Antoine Marcel’s thesis is that every household’s routines, layouts, and standards of cleanliness are too idiosyncratic for a one-size-fits-all generalist model, so Flourish One fine-tunes its skills task by task, home by home, using motion data captured from the owner’s phone and AI models running in the cloud.
Marcel’s thesis is that every household’s routines, layouts, and standards of cleanliness are too idiosyncratic for a one-size-fits-all generalist model, so Flourish One fine-tunes its skills task by task, home by home, using motion data captured from the owner’s phone and AI models running in the cloud.
The company was founded in January of this year and represents another humanoid company coming to market in less than 12 months. Marcel is obsessed with time management and told The Robot Report, “I’ve automated everything in my computer. But when I came home, the most painful stuff in my life was still there.” When asked why start with the home rather than an industrial application, Marcel replied that every home is different—organization and routines are personal. Instead of waiting for a generalist AI model, Flourish fine-tunes per-task, per-home. “The way I tidy my apartment is not the same as you do in your house,” he said.
The first batch of 50 robots will be hand-built by a tiny team to learn what domestic robotics really looks like outside the lab. The company is promising an easy-to-use training interface, and the result, if it works, could be one of the first commercially available robots that busy families can actually train to handle real chores.
Source: The Robot Report