Teaching a robot to fold a towel is one thing, but getting it to move through an entire workflow is a more involved process.

Machines need to move between jobs, respond when something goes wrong and continue working without constant supervision.

Dyna Robotics said its new semi-humanoid robot, Taku, is built around that idea, with the ability to handle an entire laundry process from washer to shelf.

Dyna Robotics, a Redwood City, California-based robotics company, unveiled Taku on Sept. 29 as part of its new Dyna-2.1 system.

According to the company’s launch materials, the wheeled robot uses two arms and a folding lower body to move between different parts of a workspace and complete several tasks in sequence.

In a demonstration, Taku loaded and started washers and dryers, removed towels, folded and sorted them and placed the finished stacks on shelves.

Dyna said the system is designed to handle full workflows rather than completing one isolated task at a time.

What separates the demonstration from a single-task robot is Taku’s ability to keep track of several steps at once.

According to Dyna’s research post, the robot can pause one task when another becomes more urgent, such as stopping towel folding to unload a finished dryer before returning to the earlier job.

The system can also keep track of unfinished work and retry or adjust its approach when a task does not go as planned, rather than immediately requiring human help.

These abilities are meant to help the robot continue working even when the order of tasks changes throughout a shift.

Dyna is positioning Taku as a workplace tool rather than a demonstration robot.

The company says its technology is already being used in hotels, restaurants and laundromats, where repetitive tasks can take up large amounts of workers’ time.

Dyna Robotics CEO Lindon Gao said the company’s goal is to move robots beyond controlled demonstrations and make them useful in everyday workplaces.

“We’re bringing robots into real life,” Gao said in a press release, adding that the company is working to make the technology commercially viable.

Still, Taku’s long-term performance in real workplaces remains unclear.

The Rundown noted that Dyna has not released details on pricing, reliability across repeated runs or how much labor the system could save.

The company also has not provided a measured result for how long Taku can operate before requiring human intervention.

For now, the laundry demonstration shows what a more independent workplace robot might look like, but broader use will depend on whether it can perform those same tasks consistently in real workplace settings.