Teleoperated Robot Helpers at Home: ABB Lessons

How a teleoperated robot works in the home today, from Argonne's 1949 master-slave arms to remote operators folding laundry, and what ABB arms already allow.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/14/20265 min read

Many of the home robots now folding towels and wiping counters have a person behind them. A teleoperated robot is steered by a remote operator who sees through its cameras and moves its arms, and in 2026 that is how most paid home robot services work. The recordings of those sessions are also how the robots are supposed to learn the job. This post traces teleoperation from the nuclear labs of the 1940s through telepresence robots to today's remote-operated home helpers, and looks at the ABB tools that already let people guide industrial arms from a distance.

White two armed robot on a wheeled base with a screen showing a woman's face in a purple lit hall
White two armed robot on a wheeled base with a screen showing a woman's face in a purple lit hall

Team NimbRo's avatar robot, which a remote operator controls through a headset, at the ANA Avatar XPRIZE finals in 2022. Photo: Sven Behnke / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From hot cells to telepresence robots

Teleoperation began with radioactive material. In 1945 Central Research Laboratories got a contract to build a remote manipulator for Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, so researchers could handle hot samples through the wall of a shielded cell. Raymond Goertz, a mechanical engineer at Argonne, filed a patent for an early master-slave manipulator in 1949. The operator moved a handle on one side of the wall, and a mechanical copy of the hand on the other side followed each motion.

Row of long mechanical manipulator arms mounted above glowing orange windows in a lab wall
Row of long mechanical manipulator arms mounted above glowing orange windows in a lab wall

A row of master-slave manipulators above the shielded windows of the Alpha-Gamma Hot Cell Facility at Argonne National Laboratory. Photo: Argonne National Laboratory / Wikimedia Commons (attribution)

Goertz then saw that the two sides could be coupled by electric servos, with force fed back so the operator could feel what the slave hand was gripping. That idea, bilateral force reflection, is still the basis of telerobotics. He also built one of the first head-mounted displays so an operator could look around the remote space. Master-slave arms such as the Mk. 8 made by Central Research Laboratories became standard equipment in hot cells, and later remote machines took on nuclear cleanup, a story told in our post on nuclear decommissioning robots.

Man in a blue shirt gripping manipulator handles in front of a thick green tinted window
Man in a blue shirt gripping manipulator handles in front of a thick green tinted window

An operator works remote manipulators through the window of a hot cell at Idaho National Laboratory. Photo: Idaho National Laboratory / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Telepresence carried the idea out of the hot cell. In 1980 Marvin Minsky's essay in Omni magazine made the word widely known and imagined people working through remote bodies. Telepresence robots reached offices and schools in the 2010s, though most were a screen on wheels with no arms. In 2022 Team NimbRo from the University of Bonn won the ANA Avatar XPRIZE with a robot whose operator wore a headset and controlled two arms and hands. Our telepresence robot history covers that branch in more detail.

Man in a white shirt bending toward a small white wheeled robot with a screen at a trade fair
Man in a white shirt bending toward a small white wheeled robot with a screen at a trade fair

A visitor bows to a telepresence robot at the IFA electronics fair in Berlin, 2015. Photo: dambranslv / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Remote operators inside today's homes

In October 2026 Robohub republished an article by Wai-keung Fung, a senior lecturer in electronics, robotics and control engineering at Cardiff Metropolitan University, arguing that the real test for humanoids is doing the laundry. At the World Humanoid Robot Games 2026 in Beijing, the robot Tiangong Ultra ran 100 metres in 8.64 seconds. Laundry is harder. Fung writes that no robot system can yet reliably handle the whole process, from carrying the basket and sorting to washing, drying, folding and ironing. A shirt may be inside out or have a sleeve hidden under a towel, and the fabric changes shape every time it is picked up.

Large carts heaped with white sheets in a laundry hall with ducts overhead
Large carts heaped with white sheets in a laundry hall with ducts overhead

Piles of sheets waiting for the ironer and folder in an industrial laundry. Photo: Samuli Lintula / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

For now, companies fill that gap with remote people. Tau Robotics in San Francisco sends humanoids to clean homes for $30 an hour, each steered by a trained operator off site who watches cameras on its head and wrists. Weave Robotics announced its Isaac 1 home robot in July 2026 at $8,000 or $449 a month. It folds clothes, clears clutter and makes beds, and a remote human looks through its cameras when it needs help. 1X offers its Neo humanoid with a similar mix of autonomy and remote control. All of these operators also produce the data that trains the next version of the software.

Grey two armed PR2 robot standing at a round red table in an office with a whiteboard
Grey two armed PR2 robot standing at a round red table in an office with a whiteboard

A PR2 research robot at Willow Garage, the platform many home robot labs used for chores such as towel folding. Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB makes no home robot, but its industrial arms already accept remote guidance. Externally Guided Motion, an option for ABB controllers, lets an outside computer stream position targets to the robot every few milliseconds. Many research labs use it to connect ABB arms to joysticks, motion trackers and virtual reality rigs. The dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000, with two seven-axis arms, is a common pick for two-handed research of this kind. ABB's GoFa cobots can also be taught by hand with lead-through programming, which is close kin to teleoperation: a person moves the arm, and the robot remembers the path.

Two armed ABB YuMi robot working at a bench next to a woman in a lab coat
Two armed ABB YuMi robot working at a bench next to a woman in a lab coat

ABB's dual arm YuMi IRB 14000 assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Where teleoperated home robots go next

Most of these services plan to need fewer operators over time. Each remote session records what the cameras saw and how the arms moved, and those recordings train the robot's own control software. In January 2024 Stanford's Mobile ALOHA project showed that a wheeled two-armed robot, after about 50 teleoperated demonstrations of a task, could learn to cook shrimp or wipe up a spill on its own. Open X-Embodiment, a research project Fung cites, has pooled more than one million robot trajectories from 22 types of robot.

Dual arm ABB robot on a wheeled base placing a sample holder into a centrifuge
Dual arm ABB robot on a wheeled base placing a sample holder into a centrifuge

ABB's mobile YuMi concept loading a centrifuge in a laboratory. Photo: ABB

Skills do not copy easily from one robot to another. A fold learned on a fixed arm with overhead cameras may fail on a humanoid that has to keep its balance while it reaches across a table. Privacy is another open problem. An operator watching a live feed sees the inside of someone's home, and Tau says it keeps unblurred footage for training unless customers ask for deletion. Cost is still high as well, because an hour of cleaning by a teleoperated robot uses an hour of an operator's time.

Old sepia photo of a girl folding towels at a long wooden table with stacks of linen
Old sepia photo of a girl folding towels at a long wooden table with stacks of linen

A 15 year old worker folds towels by hand in a laundry, 1917. Photo: Lewis Hine / Library of Congress (public domain)

Factories already work the way these services hope to. On an ABB line, engineers build and check a robot program in simulation before it runs, and an operator steps in only when something stops. That work is done in RobotStudio, which can also show a cell through a virtual reality or augmented reality headset. A home robot that calls a remote person only when it gets stuck would follow the same pattern, and one operator could then look after several robots at once.

Man wearing an AR headset gesturing beside a white ABB cobot arm in a glass cell
Man wearing an AR headset gesturing beside a white ABB cobot arm in a glass cell

An engineer uses an augmented reality headset to check a GoFa robot cell before it is built. Photo: ABB

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