A San Francisco-based robotics company has developed a $3,555 home robot that owners can teach new household chores in about 30 minutes.
Flourish Robots said owners can teach the 3 ft, 7in high and 44 lb Flourish 1 new tasks through a mobile app by physically demonstrating how they should be performed. The process requires no coding, allowing users to train the robot for tasks specific to their homes.
Source: Flourish
Built for everyday household assistance, Flourish 1 combines a wheeled base with two arms, a vertically adjustable body and basic grippers. The system can be trained to handle chores ranging from picking up clothes and toys to wiping tables, fetching objects and watering plants. It can also tackle more involved tasks, such as loading a dishwasher and clearing a cat litter box, then repeat and schedule those chores autonomously.
Rather than relying on a universal robot model, Flourish fine-tunes pretrained models for specific homes, objects and tasks. This task-specific approach reduces the amount of physical AI required for each application, although it could affect the robot’s performance when operating in significantly different environments.
Flourish 1 can run for up to 12 hours on a charge and lift up to 3.3 lb. The company said the limited payload is an intentional trade-off that simplifies the hardware and helps lower costs. The robot is also relatively slow, reflecting the company’s focus on practical household assistance rather than speed or maximum physical performance.
Once trained, the robot uses cameras and lidar to navigate and perform chores without human intervention. Its arms are designed to stop when a person enters their reach, providing an additional safety measure during operation.
