Meet The Humanoid Robot Designed To Clean Your Hotel Room

Forbes

21 hours ago

The Zerith H1 restocks amenities in a hotel shower. It can also clean floors and pick up towels and ... More clothes.
Next time you toss used towels onto the floor of your hotel room, it could be a housekeeping robot scooping them up. Meet Zerith H1, a humanoid robot designed specifically for the hospitality industry. The bot can autonomously clean floors, restock amenities and even scrub toilets with a brush.
Chinese startup Zerith Robotics, founded in January with a focus on the large-scale deployment of humanoids, says the H1 has the power to transform the hospitality industry, which took a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel sharply declined and holing up at home became the norm, leading many laid-off or furloughed employees to ditch the industry for more secure jobs. The American Hotel & Lodging Association's 2025 annual state of the industry report indicates that the industry is still short some 200,000 workers from pre-pandemic levels.
Zerith H1 has a torso — height adjustable from ground level up to 6.5 feet — attached to a small base outfitted with flexible wheels. Its arms, with seven degrees of freedom, can lengthen to about 2.5 feet and be outfitted with dexterous robo-hands. It's equipped with artificial intelligence, sensors and depth cameras that allow it to avoid obstacles and navigate narrow hallways and rooms with various layouts. It has a battery life of four hours.
Zerith Robotics recently posted a video showing the bot at work in a hotel bathroom — tossing towels in a laundry hamper like a pro, replenishing toiletries, tidying the counter and even filling a vase of flowers with fresh water from the sink.
'We chose the hospitality industry because our ultimate goal is to enter households,' Min Yuheng, founder of Zerith Robotics, said in an email. 'Hotels serve as an ideal standard scenario leading to homes, with clear demands and reusable data that can be applied to household settings.'
Robotic devices have been vacuuming carpets, mopping floors and cleaning litter boxes for years now. But while companies from 1X to Tesla are working on humanoid robots to help with household chores, it's still unusual to see these androids roaming messy homes, brooms in their robo-hands.
Zerith was jointly incubated by Tsinghua University and the Jianghuai Advanced Technology Center and has assembled experts in artificial intelligence and robotics from such companies as Baidu, TikTok owner ByteDance and iFlyTek, which supplies voice recognition software.
The H1 housekeeping bot needs more training to adapt to diverse environments before it can infiltrate the home market, Yuheng said. Then there's the price. If Zerith ultimately envisions the H1 as a domestic helper, the bot's current tag of around $13,700 isn't exactly hospitable to the average consumer.
A representative from the American Hotel & Lodging Association declined to comment on what housecleaning robots would mean for human workers, but acknowledged labor shortages in the sector. In a survey released earlier this year by the AHLA, nearly 65% of hotels polled continued to report staffing shortages.These were most common in housekeeping, at 38%, followed by front desk roles, at 26%. Hotels also reported having trouble finding workers to fill culinary positions and maintenance roles.
While hotels have yet to widely incorporate robots into their workforce, some have already started experimenting with them. Among these businesses are Seattle's Astra hotel, where Sparky the robot butler will happily deliver your room service order, and Yotel NYC in Times Square, where a 15-foot robotic arm hoists luggage into storage lockers in the lobby for travelers who want to walk around unburdened before or after checking in.
But robots don't always make hotel life smoother for guests — at least not yet.
In 2019, the 'world's first robot hotel' fired more than half of its 200-plus robot workers after guest complaints about technical difficulties made the machines more trouble than they were worth. One staff member reportedly said, 'It's easier now that we're not being frequently called by guests to help with problems with the robots.'