An Airbnb host is accusing a San Francisco robotics startup of trashing his precious pad while secretly using it to test prototype robots.
In a lawsuit filed late last month and first reported by SFGate, the host, Sean Donovan, said that workers from The Bot Company booked his childhood home that he was renting out under “false pretenses” and left it in a wretched state, with damage found on everything from the paint to the floors to his antique furniture.
This purportedly wasn’t the work of a couple engineers screwing around. Using his outdoor Ring camera, Donovan claimed he saw more than 30 people coming and going from the house between April 12 and 25, and overheard some of them talking about their “shifts,” he told SFGate in an interview.
In other words, as Donovan suspected, his house was being used as an ad-hoc R&D lab — something he didn’t consent to. He’s seeking more than $12,000 in damages.
The Bot Company was founded by Kyle Vogt and Paril Jain. Vogt was the founder of Cruise, General Motor’s defunct robotaxi division. It’s reportedly raised more than $300 million, but little is known about Vogt’s latest venture, other than its core pitch to build robots that can help with household chores. Details on its robots haven’t been shared with the public.
Donovan may have gotten a rare glimpse. The group booked the house under the pretense of being remote workers from Thailand, he claimed. But when Donovan stopped by one day to take out their trash, he saw bundles of wires leading into his house. When he followed them, he stumbled on a huge robot that looked like a “borg” from Star Trek, a species of cyborg humanoid. It was, in fact, like a six-foot “Roomba with treads,” he told SFGate.
While he never saw it in action, it must’ve caused quite the ruckus when Donovan wasn’t around. An entire Franciscan pottery set went missing — one imagines it may have been demolished by a rogue robot arm and subsequently ended up in one of the trash bags Donovan was helpfully taking out — in addition to a chipped bathroom tile, a banged-up coffee table, and an entire missing shoe rack, per the reporting. There was even a broken mug with a handle glued back on.
Unfortunately for the Donovan lineage, family heirlooms weren’t spared: a cherished dining room table that had been in the family for over seventy years received a few additional decades worth of aging in the form of water marks and scratches.
“Imagine you go into your house, and everything in every drawer is gone and there’s new stuff there,” Donovan told SFGate. “They came in and put everything back in a new place. Silverware in a new drawer or a different room. It was like they completely moved everything.”
If all this is true, it’s a cartoonish display of cheapskatery from a valuable startup, sneakily turning someone’s home into a test environment since it’d rather not spend the money building one on its own. There’s real value in testing a robot in something more akin to a real world environment, but doing it without the consent of the people involved is slimy. (Then again, that’s what’s already happening with robotaxis and public roads.)
And ethics aside, it also doesn’t sound awfully smart. If the goal is to keep everything under wraps, wouldn’t lugging around giant robots that tornado through unsuspecting Airbnb hosts’ properties be a little counterproductive? But hey, we’re not the ones who racked up hundreds of millions in VC money.
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