Tuesday Labs Debuts $20,000 'Droid Butler' Voxel Series-1

New York technology company Tuesday Labs has unveiled its first semi-autonomous home robot, the Voxel Series-1, with an estimated price of $20,000. Founder Rosalind Shinkle, a former Boston Dynamics engineer, describes the machine as a "droid butler" — deliberately cuboid, small and nothing like a humanoid.

Voxel handles household tasks such as watering plants and sweeping crumbs. It does so through a combination of autonomous intelligence and teleoperation (remote human control). The robot stands at counter height, wears a colorful matte plastic shell, and has LED eyes plus 1-DOF grippers for hands — meaning each hand moves on a single axis.

Why not a humanoid?

The design choice is the core of the story. Shinkle told Dezeen that early concepts drew on everyday objects: lamps, chairs and briefcases.

"We deliberately didn't build a humanoid," Shinkle said. "We wanted to stay far from the uncanny valley, and far from robots that fill a human-shaped space in the home."

The uncanny valley is the discomfort people feel toward machines that look almost, but not quite, human. Voxel's blocky form is a way of signaling what it is and isn't.

"We made Voxel relatively small and cuboid, to signal his role in your life: a droid butler, not a human butler," she said.

The calibration matters at both ends of the scale. "We know we don't want him to feel almost-human, and we know we don't want him to feel like a toaster," she continued. "A believable character needs every element sitting at roughly the same point on that human–toaster spectrum."

Shinkle developed the character with former Pixar designer Alonso Martinez. She called the finished Voxel a combination of "exceptional capability and charming character."

What does the design actually do?

Five principles drove the robot, according to Shinkle: easy integration into the home, a maximalist appearance, simplicity, luxury and playfulness.

A key mechanism is what she calls "affordance matching" — making a robot's capabilities readable at a glance. "When someone looks at a robot, they should be able to roughly predict what he's capable of," Shinkle said. Match perception to reality, she argued, and you avoid the "constant feeling of disappointment when a humanoid robot isn't quite as good at doing things as a human."

The lightweight plastic shell and finishes are also meant to communicate quality, not just keep the weight down. Voxel runs on a rechargeable battery and recharges in an at-home docking station as part of "his normal routine."

Who buys it, and what changes?

Like Neo by 1X Technologies, another home robot currently in production, Voxel launches to a limited group of early adopters who will informally train its autonomous software in their own homes.

"We're starting with a limited number of robots for early adopters who are excited to experience and help shape this technology," Shinkle said.

At $20,000, Voxel starts as a luxury product, but the company frames that as a first step. "As the technology improves and production scales, we want to make household robots accessible to far more people," she said.

The personal motivation is blunt. "I hate cleaning my apartment, and I'd much rather spend my time building something that solves that problem once and for all," Shinkle said. "Robots will soon be a part of our homes. I set out to build the robot that I would actually want to live with."

Tuesday Labs, founded in 2025 and based in New York City, says it is focused on "robots that feel natural and delightful to live with." It enters a field that is diversifying fast: recent home-robot debuts include Neo by 1X Technologies and CLOiD by LG, alongside the cute robots shown at CES 2025 and five robots displayed at Carlo Ratti's Venice Architecture Biennale.