Show HN: Would You Rent a Robot for Your Home?
1 MASNeo 4 6/19/2025, 9:21:45 PM
I like robots. Building one is tough in my time, so I looked at buying, but with current uncertainty about capabilities I would not buy one outright. I would like to try one, for some time (maybe hack that?!). I would rent, but I can’t. So I thought maybe if I am not alone that could be useful to some.
To try: https://roborentals.ch/
This is an experiment (including what loveable.dev is capable of in a single afternoon, not affiliated) to find out if there are others that love - pun intended - to rent and to collect feedback on the idea of modeling a robot rental service on a car rental business and pricing model.
What would you like a service like that to cover, which features are you missing and what’s a turn-off, which assurances would you want, what would turn you away or do you think this is just not reasonable in any way?
In short: what do you think?
P.S.: sudo sorryforearliermispost --force
If the info on the website is the idea. It's way too expensive for the use cases listed. I don't think a robot can do most of the things listed, certainly not better than a human. I also don't need extensive training, and a few hours, to learn how to operate a human I hire, they presumably know more than me and I just point to the problem and they take care of it better than I could even explain.
So I can rent for up to 3 months, with a base cost of $1,042. Estimated price to buy my own starts at $25,000. Are people going to pay $93k to rent a $25k robot for 3 months?
You mention hacking the rented robot. That would certainly violate the terms of the rental would it not? How can a rental company send it into someone else's home when the person before spent their time doing who know's what to it's programming? That could be very dangerous.
The only way this works is for on-off specific tasks that the robot is purpose built for... like renting a carpet shampooer from the grocery store. Make Roomba version of a carpet shampooer and people will probably rent that for $60/day instead of the $40 for the manual one.
If I rent a car, I don't pay different rates for mileage or where I take the car (tolls aside)
more to your point, I'm struggling to think of even one task I'd let a robot attempt in my home, supervised or not.