Dyna's Taku Robot Ran a One Hour Laundry Job on Wheels

So basically: On Sept. 29, Dyna Robotics posted a new robot called Taku and a one hour laundry video it says is uncut and autonomous. Taku has a person’s upper body, a folding waist, and four wheels. It is not at a customer site yet.

What the hour was

Dyna’s example is a hotel laundry room. Washers, dryers, a folding table, and shelves sit meters apart. Taku loads, unloads, folds, stacks, and shelves. If a machine finishes while it is folding, it is supposed to stop and go deal with that machine.

Dyna breaks one laundry cycle into about 79 steps and 13 decision points. A dropped towel goes back to the dirty load. A dropped stack sends those towels back to the start. The company uses a simple example: if each step only works 95 percent of the time, a cycle that long almost never finishes without help. That 95 percent is their illustration, not a score they published for this run.

How they split the job

Three layers run the robot. A controller trained in simulation turns wrist, elbow, chest, and footprint targets into joint moves and wheel speed at 100 hertz. A policy called DYNA-2 picks the motion for the current step. A vision language model watches the room, keeps a text note of what already happened, and chooses the next step.

Taku’s arms have seven degrees of freedom each. Dyna says they use low ratio planetary actuators so the arms can move faster than arms built with harmonic drives. The body is sized like an average person so recorded human motion lands near poses the robot can reach. The name comes from takumi, a Japanese word for a master craftsman.

Dyna says the action model was pretrained on one million hours of human video mixed with robot data. On older stationary folding jobs, the company says a new site can hit its production bar in as little as three days. Its earlier napkin robot once folded for 24 hours, but a person still had to refill the bin and clear the stacks.

My take

An uncut hour is a better demo than a highlight reel. It is still one hour, in a workflow Dyna set up, on a robot that has not started customer shifts. Dyna’s own next step is taking this system to a real site. Until a hotel can leave it alone for a shift, the video shows the job they want, not a worker they replaced.