San Mateo County Could Be First to Regulate Humanoid Robots for Commercial Use | KQED
Several companies across the country have already started rolling out humanoid robots as pilots. In San Francisco, residents hire humanoid robots from Tau Robotics to clean their home or office for $30 an hour, but the cleaning is supervised by remote human...
Key takeaways
- The most recent developments in humanoid robotics show rapid expansion into both commercial and regulatory arenas.
- At the Humanoids Summit 2026, Honda unveiled its new “Avatar” robot—a tele‑operated humanoid with a dexterous multi‑fingered hand that is positioned as a physical extension for humans in hazardous or remote tasks, reviving the legacy of its ASIMO platform.
- In parallel, Mitsubishi Motors announced a partnership with the University of Tokyo startup Highlanders to mass‑produce up to 1,000 “HL Human” humanoid units per month at its Kyoto engine plant, targeting manufacturing, logistics and disaster‑response work.
- Tau Robotics has begun a pilot in San Francisco that lets residents hire its $50,000 humanoid cleaners for $30 an hour, though the service is still supervised by remote operators.
- Industry analysts are projecting explosive growth: Goldman Sachs expects global shipments to reach 76,000 units in 2027 and 502,000 by 2032, while Barclays predicts the market could swell from its current $2‑3 billion valuation to $200 billion by 2035.
Several companies across the country have already started rolling out humanoid robots as pilots. In San Francisco, residents hire humanoid robots from Tau Robotics to clean their home or office for $30 an hour, but the cleaning is supervised by remote human operators according to the company website.
Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at UC Berkeley, said that while it’s not a bad idea to start thinking about legislation, the humanoid workforce is still a long way off from being genuinely useful.
Goldberg said that while people have been expecting humanoid robots since the ’60s, engineers are still at least 10 years away — if not more — from creating robots that can do practical tasks. “They’re good at walking, they’re good at backflips, but they’re very poor at motor skills,” Goldberg said.
This gap exists, in part, because we do not have data to train these robots on, Goldberg said. The large language models powering artificial intelligence today were trained on 100,000 years of data, Goldberg wrote in 2025. Conversely, the largest dataset available for humanoid robots is “on the order of one year of data.”
While meaningful deployment may still be far away, Julie Lind, a representative of the San Mateo Labor Council, told KQED that she is already seeing pilot deployments for these humanoid robots in home cleaning, manufacturing, and warehouse work. California does not currently have a “comprehensive regulatory framework governing the commercial deployment and operation of humanoid robots,” the resolution states, and establishing this framework in advance will allow San Mateo to “encourage the responsible integration of emerging technologies.”
The humanoid robot Pepper chats with children at a high-tech gadgets exhibition in Tokyo.
Mueller said he intended the resolution to establish a permitting process that could track the rollout of these robots and that the permitting data could help the county evaluate potential risks, like job displacement, fires and other safety issues.
“Data like that is like gold to public agencies,” Mueller said.
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