What Comes After the Roomba?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm really skeptical that there is anything “after the roomba”. Or, to be more specific, I'm skeptical that technology used in the home will look anything like a robot, a self-contained intelligent machine that moves around and cleans/folds laundry/does dishes.
Ther are a couple of reasons for this. This first is that these problems are extremely hard to solve. And this is not true just in terms of algorithms, but also in terms of hardware. A humanoid robot is as complex as, if not more complex than, an automobile. Currently, humanoid robots go for $500,000 a pop. Even after economies of scale it's hard for me to imagine that getting below $50,000 — much less $5,000, which is probably the price range that makes them viable as anything other than a novelty for wealthy people.
Which brings up the second point. One thing I have learned the hard way in robotics is that you have to understand precisely what your competition is and how much money that competition requires to solve the problem. In the case of an in-home robot, for most of us the competition is our own labor or that of our significant others/kids/housemates. But we are not the early adopters of this technology. Wealthy people are. For wealthy people, the competition is either a live-in assistant or a contract cleaning service. Contract cleaning services pay their workers approximately minimum wage. Minimum wage is a very difficult price target for a robot to meet.
And the third issue is that to first approximation these problems are already solved. And not by what we would consider a robot, but by appliances. My grandmother, for most of her life, kept house without elecricity, and hence without a dishwasher, vacuum, or dryer. These appliances dramatically reduced the effort it takes to keep house, without being robots. I strongly suspect that any cost-efficient solution to folding clothes or taking dirty dishes from the sink and turning them into clean dishes in a cupboard will resemble an appliance. If you want your dishes cleaned robotically, then you don't put a robot in the kitchen. You turn the kitchen into a robot.
Except for microprocessors. But microprocessors are deeply weird, economically.
How does that have anything to do with the concrete arguments that the parent comment is talking about?
If you can build a car for 15k you can build a humanoid robot for 15k.
I'm happy to take a long bet on this.
This may be that the economies of scale aren't big enough, but we're already talking about hundreds of thousands of units per year in the industry. The car industry builds 75 million or so units per year. They get away with it because of turnover. Fleet owners don't keep cars past 20,000 or 30,000 miles. High end car owners replace their cars every couple of years. They pay $30,000 to $70,000 every five years. Because cars are more than transportation, they're a lifestyle choice and in many cases a sign of conspicuous consumption.
I have a hard time thinking of any other consumer item that is both owned by the vast majority of people and is also a sign of wealth, that is purchased in the high tens of millions every year and for which people happily pay more than $20,000.
Cars aren't a good proxy for household robots here, I think.
Cars aren't scrapped after five years. The average car on the road is over 10 years old, and they're not normally scrapped before about 15 years old.
No, of course not. But fleet owners buy new ones every five years or less. Typically the old cars are sold on the used market. Which means there is always a market for new cars, and a steady availability of used ones.
But the point is: fleet owners turn their inventory over much faster than the cars wear out.
The limiting factor will be how quickly AI that can support such a thing comes along.
I don't think humanoid is a viable form factor. A mobile robotic arm is easier to build and has similar benefits.
It has the benefit, that we already build plenty of them and they have proven their usability in industrial settings. Now we"just" need the brains to run one of these in the kitchen
Yes, we currently don't have the technology, but nailing one or two use cases in a couple of years(e.g. being able to pick up and collect clothes onto a pile, maybe even emptying the dishwasher) may be enough for initial deployment.
Also since you can make the hardware quite safe, you can have faster Software Innovation than in cars
This is pretty much a textbook example of something that would be both very difficult for a robot and an almost trivial task for a human. A washer/dryer already does about 95% of the work of doing laundry. (Less, admittedly, if you iron but then that's another task. And one I assume there is machinery but just not worthwhile at home scale.)
And, of course, there's always the option of taking your laundry into somewhere to have it done for you. There have been efforts at services that pickup to do this sort of thing but most people aren't willing to pay for it.
Probably not so. If these problems get solved, they will get solved by an intricate dance between hardware, sensing, and software. This is not like a car, where we mostly know what the hardware needs to look like and it's just a matter of nailing the algorithms. For humanoid robot we may need - will probably need - pervasive tactile sensing, and possibly smell, and certainly visible light sensing but maybe also infrared, or lidar, or sonar, or who knows? We're still arguing about inner position loop versus inner torque loop versus series-elastic-based compliance control schemes, for heaven's sake. And we don't know what the right kinematics for the hands will be, and on and on.
One thing I am absolutely certain of is that no currently existing humanoid robot could be placed in a home and successfully clean it, no matter what software it has.
If the robot is humanoid or not is beside the point. It may be an expensive robot, but if it lasts years, and can service many households, it becomes affordable.
A 500,000 dollar robot, if it lasts a decade, and can service ten or twenty households is between 2,500 and 5,000 a year, 200-400 dollars a month plus maintenance and travel? It's not inconceivable. If it has 100 operational hours a week it could spend 5-10 hours at your house cleaning a week.
I'm not familiar enough with the price of house cleaning services to know if this a good deal or not. But if that first cost falls from 500,000 to 100,000 or 50,000 then surely this starts to be a great deal.
Much more likely would be a robot-for-hire service, like existing maid services, with the robot being driven in on a set schedule. The robot would have the digital key to your IoT lock and would let itself in.
Like, my grandmother has a maid come once a week and the maid doesn't even use up all of her 2-hour appointment getting the place squared away.
Even at 100% utilization, that robot can't be $500,000
(/s)
But really, it might just be that people use 20% of their dish-washable objects 80% of the time. So having 2 dish washers eliminate 80% of the labor of putting them in the cupboard because 80% will be gone in the other machine by the time you really have to fill the cupboards.
Then again, that's lazyness and I suspect the higher humidity of the dishwasher is an health issue.
I'm now seriously contemplating putting this on a my list for when I renovate/build a house.
If I don't like it, it's also pretty easy to rip it out and replace it with a large cabinet, especially if you opt for the "built-in" door cover for the dishwasher.
Reminds me of - and can be combined with - my father's "invention" when he got a bad back of installing the dishwasher at cupboard height.
Econo european models for washing/drying clothes take 6+ hours for a reason.
I think your right there. Personally I don't even have room for a humanoid robot, it'd be getting in my way constantly.
What I would like to see is something more along the lines of a series of those programmable industrial robotic arms extending from my ceiling. That's something that could fetch me a beer from the fridge, take my empty plate to the sink and move my dirty clothes to the laundry, all without getting in my way. That would be a good base to start expanding functionality on.
Also for some things like the clothes hamper example, it's not a matter of saving much time but actually doing it where a lazy human (me) would just leave it.
I'm curious why you think that is the case? What is so expensive about humanoid robots? I don't disagree with you, I have no knowledge on the matter, i'm just curious as it doesn't comport with my intuition.
Humanoids are just extremely complicated systems with a lot of moving parts that require very high reliability, along with a metric ton of sensors and the wiring harness needed to support all of it.
For reference, a standard brushless DC motor that is reliable enough, strong enough, and precise enough for use in a robot will retail for around $1000. Just for the motor. And you need at least 30 of them, probably more.
You could in theory make 500K robots at 5K if you give up any notion of recouping development cost by tackling ridiculous margins, and instead concentrate on moving millions of units.
For example, just the motors, rotary encoders, and joints of a 6 degree of freedom robotic arm capable of lifting 20 kg (with a specialized tool, no hands or jointed fingers!) are 2-3 times the size of the average human arm without any of the sensing capabilities or dexterity. Beating a single human hand in pipetting at speed, for simple vertical movements, takes up even more space with the xyz ballscrews.
Obviously biological systems are much more limited in repeatability, endurance, compliance and so on, but those are the trade offs we get with technology.
Maybe on day we'll get artificial muscles and skin but that is all a long ways off and it might only ever be available to super rich.
2. You're comparing an in-home robot to a contract cleaner. Robots would be cheaper for the customer on a contract basis, just as a live-in maid costs more than a contract cleaning service.
I do agree that the Jetsons-esque conception of a humanoid service robot is not how things will likely shake out as domestic robotics matures; IMO the humanoid is a simplistic image that demonstrates a lack of imagination.
Cars may be a good model here. But I would argue that current generation robots aren't Model T's. 1960'-era industrial robots were the Model T. Current generation KUKA's are 1950's Cadillacs. Cars of today aren't exponentially better than a 1955 Caddy. The period of rapid growth in robotics (on the hardware side) started a while ago, and it's probably approximately linear.
Robonaut is the Lunar Rover. It's awesome, but it isn't at all clear whether any of that tech addresses a commercial market.
Obviously, the field where exponential growth is/was sustained over a significant period is chips/microprocessors. Miniaturization is well-know as the key to this.
Information processing so-far is all that has benefited here. But existence of biological organisms, constructed from cells existing on a tiny scale, shows that miniaturization could be applied to other functionalities. There's no reason to think we're near that now but the situation does invite us to imagine it in theory.
The first search result I found had this: "we track four key global crops—maize, rice, wheat, and soybean—that currently produce nearly two-thirds of global agricultural calories. We find that yields in these top four crops are increasing at 1.6%, 1.0%, 0.9%, and 1.3% per year, non-compounding rates"*
Another example is fuel efficiency of cars? Although that has hard limits.
Sure, nothing like electronics, but over decades slow compounding of small amounts does matter to us all.
* https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Well, not exactly. Both Robonaut and Baxter used series-elastic actuators. But Robonaut didn't invent them. This is kind of like saying that a lot of the tech from the lunar rover ended up in Tesla's. Sure, they both used electric motors and batteries. But Tesla's existence is in no way dependent on the lunar rover.
You're talking about cars that cost around $70k in today's dollars with 6.0L V8 carburetted pushrod engines that go 0-60 in 15 seconds, no standard AC, 4 speed transmissions....they looked cool, but you can buy a $30k Infiniti nowadays that is lighter, has just 60% the engine displacement, has fuel injection and variable valve timing/lift, goes 0-60 in 5 seconds, has 4 wheel disc brakes, a 7 speed transmission...the list goes on. Oh, and standard A/C.
I'd say that getting 3x the acceleration at half the price, with multiple times more reliability (try driving a 1955 Cadillac 300k miles without rebuilding the engine or heads), traction control, airbags, intelligent cruise control, and all the modern comforts is indicative of rapid growth. And it keeps going! Now we are seeing electric production cars and autonomous street legal vehicles.
Exponential? Maybe not. But aside from computers, it's hard to think of technological developments as exponential. They tend to be intermittent, with advances coming in fits and starts.
All of the other stuff - better acceleration, air bags, automatic transmissions, A/C - those are refinements on a capability that fundamentally didn't change. They both drive on roads at around 60 mph at approximately 25 mpg.
They're cool cars but today's $70k luxury cars are faster, stronger, more reliable, and functionally better. The old Caddies do look damn good, but I'll take a DOHC versus an OHV any day.
My point is that the technology has clearly progressed. To your point, maybe not exponentially, true. But there has definitely been a whole heap of engineering work over 60+ years that has resulted in unequivocally better, more reliable, markedly different vehicles.
2. He also compared them to just people doing their housework. He also pointed out that this would be a toy for the wealthy, and we have to consider what they want. A friend of mine is half Filipino and very wealthy, and her relatives all have live-in maids. The maids cook, clean, do laundry, basic maintenance, and can even drive kids to school. They’re not particularly expensive either (compared to a robot) and you’d need quite a few different robots to accomplish all of those tasks.
Yes, robotics will improve, but I’m not seeing the horizon past which a single affordable robot can do everything from laundry to dusting for cobwebs. It goes back to the original point of the OP, which is that for people who could afford a robot, these are already solved problems and human labor is relatively cheap compared to half a million dollars of machine.
Cars could only travel on roads, you couldn't go wherever you liked as on a horse. Narrow passages you could previously have ridden down were now inaccessible.
You need to put fuel in your car, which was probably even harder then than finding an electric car charger at the start of their existence. Providing food and drink for a horse was comparatively trivial.
Horses could easily be tied up outside of whatever store or destination you were visiting. What were the social costs of parking a great big machine outside of your local? To say nothing of parking as a town- or city-wide logistical problem.
Fuel was definitely an issue, but you could just carry tins of fuel and the car wouldn’t mind carrying them. Carrying food and water for a horse is no joke, and horses also need to rest. You also don’t have to take the saddle and bridle off a car, wash the car and brush it down. Horses really are a lot of work, especially if you’re working them hard. Remember that work also comes at the end of a long day in the saddle, which is hard work for you, especially if you’re beating a trail at a trot.
Parking... I have no idea about the logistics of parking at that time, so I can’t say.
> At the turn of the 20th century, the most malodorous environmental challenge facing the world’s big cities was not slums, sewage or soot; it was horse dung. In London in 1900, an estimated 300,000 horses pulled cabs and omnibuses, as well as carts, drays and haywains, leaving a swamp of manure in their wake. The citizens of New York, which was home to 100,000 horses, suffered the same blight; they had to navigate rivers of muck when it rained, and fly-infested dungheaps when the sun shone. At the first international urban-planning conference, held in New York in 1898, manure was at the top of the agenda. No remedies could be found, and the disappointed delegates returned home a week early. (https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/11/26/the-futu...)
See also The Horse & the Urban Environment: https://enviroliteracy.org/environment-society/transportatio...
That said, I'm unconvinced that smell and mess are as compelling a selling-point as all that. Societally they're very important, but not obviously more than non-fuel-burning vehicles today. In practice, when it comes to making a purchase, there are often much more pressing concerns than an environmental issue over which you individually have little influence.
> That car massively outperformed its competition
Nope. Initially cars couldn't even match horses in speed. Although speed did rapidly become the reason to get a car, but initially this wasn't the case.
> It didn’t buck you off or startle, didn’t get sick and die, didn’t shit all over the roads
Yes it did. Early cars ... there were no more than a few dozen in a city, yet it was a daily occurrence that one blew up. Early gasoline engines ...
Second: the brakes.
Third: incomplete burning of fuel. It was constantly leaking oil/gas everywhere.
And all that is assuming you got them started. Even movies from 1920/1930 are full of scenes were cars don't start. That was after decades of fixing issues. Imagine what the first ones were like.
> It was able to go faster, longer, and more comfortably than a horse
Nope, nope, and nope.
Carriage suspensions were far superior to car suspensions for several decades. Cars were big bikes with an engine. More comfortable than a horse on bad dirt roads ? I doubt it very much.
https://media.daimler.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Augus...
That was a rigid tricicle. No tires. Oh, and if you don't know how to make brakes out of old shoes, no brakes, or at least not for long.
Not to mention that even the Model T came out with handcrank-start, which involved manually retarding the spark timing so you don't spark before TDC and break your hand when the crank kicks back. Ford didnt offer electric start until after the first decade of production. And that's in an era where well over a hundred different automobile manufacturers were already in existence, the automobile had already circumnavigated the globe, and gasoline powered taxis were already hauling fares in Paris, London, and NYC.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18297710
1. You are imagining current technologies at scale, but future technologies are likely to get cheaper and better. Robotics is still a newborn field. Cars have also gotten cheaper and better; the Model T started out around 20k in today's dollars for a 20hp car that went 45mph.
I didn’t set the comparison, and decades of cars before the Model T (released in 1908, only about a decade after the first practical automobile available in the US was released by Benz for a fortune) wwre hardlu displacing the horse. The mass transition from horses to automobiles began in earnest with the Model T, and the post you were replying to was pointing out the need to define your competition. The major competition for the Model T was a horse. Cars before it were finicky, incredibly expensive, unreliable, and out of the hands of the average person. The Model T changed all of that. Given that we were talking about how current humanoid robots could only be the toy of very wealthy people, it seems a fair comparison. The problem for you is that it supports the opposite point to the one you tried to make.
You took my point to mean that robots must today be immediately better than maids, just as the Model T was immediately better than horses. I think this is flawed because robots today are not at the same stage of development vs maids as the Model T was vs horses.
What you're missing is that the Model T wasn't competing with horses, considering that production automobiles had been around for decades. It was competing with more expensive, heavier, less user friendly automobiles. The Buick Model 10 cost more, weighed more, and was mechanically inferior with its exposed clutch and user-oiled valve train. It, too, never got sick and puked on the side of the road. The market wasn't "Horse vs Model T", just like it's not "broom vs Roomba" today.
I don't get why it matters that your friend is Filipino or that her relatives have maids. We all know that some people have live-in maids. The question is, at what price point can comparably utile cleaning robots come to market? There will come a time when it costs less to have a robot (and hire an uber to drive the kids) than to have a person doing the same job.
When the technology brings that price point to a competitive level, the business opportunity will be obvious and there will be more investment. And that investment will bring the price down even further due to broader scale and more research money. Just as has happened with cars.
I think anyone who says robot design and manufacture are not going to encounter the quantum leaps that have graced every other technology known to man, is suffering from a lack of imagination and an inability to examine history. Imagine a group of cavemen arguing that stone tools are cheaper and better and more accessible than bronze because metals are too complicated to dig up and refine, fire is hard to deal with, and as a result the accessible bronze tools of the era are defective and poorly forged. They have a point but they are wrong in the long term. Technology advances and becomes cheaper as people find clever new ways to tackle old problems.
Meanwhile, there are always a bunch of uncreative naysayers standing on the sidelines. Obviously, people who say "this idea will never, ever be viable" are not going to be the ones who innovate and make money. For every Thomas Edison, there are a thousand less productive engineers who get frustrated and say "let's just stick to candles and gas lamps."
> human labor is relatively cheap compared to half a million dollars of machine.
Ask a laid off factory worker what he thinks about this.
Not by much. Sure a modern car is faster, more efficient and more reliable than a Model T, but at the end of the day it still does exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. Also $20k is roughly what you pay for a new entry level Ford today so it's not like prices have come down dramatically.
I'd love to see some sort of out of the way storage system with an in-home Kiva style robot that lets you select what you want in an app, and it goes and fetches it. When you want to put something away, the robot shows up, collects your item, and stores it.
To be truly useful, you'd probably need a somewhat decent sized storage area, and the robot may need to be decent sized depending on the weight and size of objects to be handled.
Clear Hanging shoe racks have helped a ton as well as large Ziploc type bags.
That was my thinking too after reading the article. Why jump through all those hoops, trying to get a robot mimicking us getting around the house and instead just build smarter, more capable appliances.
E.g.:
- having cupboards that double as dishwashers (the robot does the sorting and drying...)
- having wardrobes that double as washing machines (the robot does the sorting and drying...)
- having trash bins that do the seperation, maybe even compression
But in any of those cases, the "robot" could be a grappler on a track that never leaves the casing of the appliance
Think about a robot going around that can aim a single solar panel to the sun in 30 seconds. That robot can do 120 aims per hour, and can keep ~400 solar panels at 96%+ efficiency by going around constantly. A collection of such robots provides redundancy (like humans do, if you've got more than one).
Such a solar tracker costs ~$200 at scale per solar panel. Mechanical solutions are cheaper up front, but you'll be fixing them weekly. So a robot that can do this can sell for ~$50000 and be profitable from day 1 (because it replaces capital expenditure). There'll be way less to fix and you can probably just take the robot back to the factory while providing a replacement onsite, which would be a fantasy with the motor based solution. Or you could have N+2 or higher redundancy for large sites and come by for robot replacements once a year providing constant coverage essentially free.
The same with your kitchen. Having a general capable robot can use a lot of equipment to accomplish a great many tasks. Such a robot even means that the difference between a cheap and an expensive, say, dishwasher, disappears to an extent. The most expensive dishwasher won't match the comfort of a cheap one + a robot, and the same is true for all other appliances.
Given that how much is it allowed to cost ? 5000$ seems like a lower bound. I'd be willing to pay that, which usually means others are willing to pay 100x that, even if that seems a bit much (in the West though, perhaps not as much).
Aren't you ignoring potential reliability issues of a robot though? A lot more moving parts in a robot than a simple motor on a pivot point.
A contract cleaning service is cheap, but they aren't in your home helping you 24/7. This hypothetical $50,000 robot would be much more useful and not that much more expensive if amortized over, say, 10 years with regular maintenance.
Also who gets the robot to the house? And what cleaning company or what ever has the Capitol for a $50k purchase. The competition has their own Transit and start up costs are cleaning supplies.
If it were $50,000 per year then I agree with you.
There’s no way I can afford a full time, 8hrs / day, personal assistant.
So your robot will sit idle most of the day, unless you have a much bigger house or a big family.
And remember that for the next 20 years, the robots won't be able to do many things due to motor skills/autonomy/analysis capabilities. So they may, by as for now can't replace a full time human.
Android are still scifi.
I think you have a "neurotic" cleaner robot working full time to make sure your house, dishes, and clothes are perfectly finished. Part of the package is a cheap third-world worker for an hour to remotely waldo the robot for the difficult parts, and do the final checks.
The robot is bought using finance, like a car. Or bought on a service plan that gives you "free" upgrades every few years.
It then becomes a social norm to have a robot "My, how unclean your home is, whyever don't you get an Apple Dysony like I have".
(I'm unsure what the marketing would be in countries where you don't visit friend's houses...)
The first robot killing the cat by dropping a knife because of a lag is going to be fun.
You know, there hasn’t been a technological advancement we’ve managed to refrain from using. So it’s either it’s just a matter of time, or it’s not possible due to some limitation(a).
Let’s assuming for a minute that this does eventuate, and some robot does manage to kill the cat: we’ll get over it. We haven’t regulated the car out of existence yet, and they have a tendency to kill quite the many cats.*
*all analogies breakdown under scrutiny.
I'm convinced AI and androids will come around. I just don't think it will happen in this decade.
If latency turns out to be a serious issue, then remote control robots would be installed where latency is reliable, or where home owners can get low latency connections.
Most likely latency will improve for the valley over the next few years.
Certainly VoiP is reliable in many other countries. We use a cheap provider at work (virtually no issues), and I used it at home in 2011 and it was rock solid. And NZ is definitely on the edge of the main networks!
Edits:
PS: second anecdote: I'm on an island in the Mediterranean at the moment, and VoiP seems very usable.
PPS: what do the gamers in your neighborhood do to resolve ping times? They usually are extremely interested in diagnosing the underlying causes of latency and finding solutions (although you obviously need to find a more engineer type gamer than a script kiddie soothsayer type)
Both providers, Telstra at work, and Internode at home, give VoIP traffic the highest priority QoS, as far as I’m aware. It’s been a while since I worked Internode.
At 3 years you are likely break even with humans with no maintenance costs. At 5 you're likely actually b/e, and may need to do major matinence or an upgrade .
24/7/5 is a lot of wear and tear.
Even if we assume 90% uptime, it’s going to needs some maintenance, it comes out to a levelised cost of $6.34 an hour, plus parts and labour for the maintenance.
This still blows human labour out of the water because robots don’t complain about conditions, and they don’t intentionally run off with trade secrets.
Yet.
Automation is good. Assuming the hypothetical robot that can do the required task actually exists, it's probably worth nearer to $100k a year
Your also assuming 0 maintenance and no charging time
After the autonomous car phase will become boring people will spend more in robotic.
I think limiting our analysis to one particular form of robot is probably not a good idea. As we're still trying to figure out which form is the best for whatever that "killer app" is in robotics.
Also one reason to not turn a kitchen into a robot is generality of solution. If you can have 1 robot work in 3 kitchens is cheaper than retrofitting the 3 kitchens.
All of that being said I generally agree with your sentiment, and I think we'll see robots move into places they're needed/bring more additional value than general house chores. For example, restaurants. Where they can be faster, safer with food, but still general enough to put cheese on one burger and not the next without an engineer coming in after installation.
Other applications of the same algorithm are already happening - Husqvarna uses the same random walk to mow the lawn, and there are other robots that will weed the garden. I have a retired engineering mate who armed himself with 3D printer, a CAD package and an eBay account to construct his own automatic lawn mower. It doesn't use a random walk - it uses the 8mm precision of an RTK GPS to go through a planned an arbitrarily complex path. 8mm is good enough for all sorts tasks of course - like hedge trimming, cleaning outside windows and using compressed air to clean gutters.
Inside the house Roomba's mates have already evolved. They now know where they are in the house, which was introduced to allow them to resume where they left off. But it has also meant they can have virtual boundaries, which means the can be told where the border between time tiles and barriste carpet is so some of them are sporting mops now. Cleaning walls, side webs of ceilings and bathrooms can't be too far away. Dusting will follow shortly thereafter.
The point is these things evolve. I don't know what point you say it isn't a Roomba any more, I daresay it won't be obvious - I'm sure you will say the current lawnmowers are just Roomba's with blades. However while something that puts a wet rag on a wall won't be much smarter than today's vacuum cleaners, it won't look like a Roomba.
I think the explosion week come with imaging. I don't mean image recognition - just the recognition of 3D boundaries of objects - things like walls, bench tops, obstacles on the floor, where the windows and mirrors that need to be cleaned are, where cupboard doors that can open and shut are, where dishwashers that contain round flat things like plates that always go into the same place into those cupboards are - this is how things will evolve.
I agree we won't see a Boston dynamics style robot in the house time soon. What we will get will be far dumber, and far more useful.
Another example is Alexa/Google Home. Some people love the convenience these in-home services provide, but others find the utility itself a liability: is this thing always listening to me and recording me in my home? The robots can do too much, they have too many functions and abilities, which makes me question the intent of the robot.
For robotics to really take off, I think there needs to be a kind of anthropomorphization that needs to happen: the utility of the robot must be high enough that I know that it understands my intention and can respond accordingly; that is to say, that I can have a relationship with my robot.
It was interesting.
A history of mafia men shoveling cash and threats to DJs has me convinced otherwise.
There is/was big money to be made getting your song played on the radio and that system is/was gamed pretty hard.
Give me a smart watch: "This is great, I don't need to pull my phone out!"
Predicting what people will/won't like seems like black magic to me, with after-the-fact efforts to diagnose why "obviously" people did/did not love something somehow only works in hindsight.
I'm not saying the idea of finding something useful and making money providing it is broken, only that pushing the boundaries is inherently unpredictable, because we aren't terribly logical (or at least have a lot of variables at play)
Who ever said that, and why didn't those people carry pocketwatches?
(To be clear, I've always liked having a watch on my wrist but then I grew up with one.)
Years later I got the original Pebble, and while it was great for seeing who was calling me or getting a quick text, or banishing phantom buzz...my primary use was to check the time.
When I was a kid in the 90s, my impression was that most adults wore cheap quartz wristwatches. 25 years later, their kids have grown up but instead of wearing watches just carry phones around, because the smartphone is a good enough time-keeper.
Obviously many people still wear wristwatches, and the same type of people who wore watches as status-marking jewelry 20 years ago probably still do today. But wristwatches are no longer necessary for telling time, as pretty much everyone carries a smartphone everywhere they go. For most people the additional convenience of having the watch on the wrist isn’t worth carrying an extra device, at least not all of the time.
I suspect robots are a bit like that. They make very poor substitutes for people. But, they can do a lot of stuff ('dishwashers', for example), that are basically orthogonal to what people do, but reduce workload immensely.
There are so many gains to be made with real robotics.
I put in Prince and Spotify gives me rap. Prince has nothing to do with wrap. I put in Pizzicato 5 and Spotify gives me J-POP. Pizzicato 5 has nothing to do with J-Pop. I put in a dance tune from a popular western pop band and Spotfiy gives me ballads from popular western pop bands when what I wanted was more dance tunes.
I've never had Spotify or Apple Music or Youtube Music work ever.
Even their own playlists don't work. I tried playing "Morning Pickup" and first 2 songs are super depressing.
Where do you get this idea? Decades of TV shows indicate that people would love to have a robot servant.
Much like airplanes are not imitations of birds, its unlikely household robots will be mistaken for human slaves. A lot of time was wasted in the development years of heavier than air flight by trying to poorly imitate birds using machines.
The problem is I can get a maid that scrubs my apartment 2x a month for under $200/mo, approx $2k/year. So that sets a very harsh price ceiling on assistance robots.
It means I can leave my dirty underwear on the floor without being judged.
Many people pay lots of money for getting rid of personal inconveniences.
But in the long term, I think primate tendency toward dominance means that there's a significant market for people who want to boss around things that can be perceived as other people. I doubt many people want robot buddies, but I'd bet there's quite a market for what are in effect robot slaves.
On the one hand, that seems pretty squicky to me. But on the other, if it keeps them from trying to reduce the freedom of other humans, then godspeed.
People have lived with their human-controlled robots for months, some even took them shopping. While some stuff got broken, it can be a very engaging experience.
Whereas you never feel bad for making an appliance work 24/7, or to ask your dishwasher to start his work at 11pm.
The 1997 film, directed by master documentarian Errol Morris, covers 4 people: a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, an expert on the naked mole rat, and a then-obscure robot scientist. That robot scientist is Rodney Brooks, founder and former CTO of the Roomba's maker, iRobot.
I haven't seen it in years, but I adored the film. I saw it in the theater and had my mind blown: it was clear Errol Morris thought these very different people had something in common, but he never beats you over the head with it, letting you make up your own mind. I liked it so much I went back the next day and the next, something I've never done with a movie before or since. I'll have to watch it again to see how it looks these days.
You mean, like the Internet?
I thought that was one of the justifications for government-funded research. Long-term research that jumpstarts shorter-term private development and productization.
No. Most of the ARPANET, much less the Internet, wasn't originated from the government. They contributed maybe 3% of everything that went into it and people like to give them most of the credit. It was constructed of components invented in the private sector, with plenty of private networks among the first connections. Most of the people that worked on ARPANET were not employed by the government. SRI, BBN, Xerox were not government agencies. Harvard, Stanford, MIT, USC are not state schools. The government was the agent behind bringing ARPANET together. They did not form the actual Internet or invent most of its technology. Their single biggest contribution was being so kind as to get out of the way legally.
I'd argue that an easy 97% of everything that has gone into the Internet over the last 35 years, has been private technology and private capital. The private sector has invested trillions of dollars into building out the Internet and making it was it is. The government has contributed a laughably tiny sum by comparison, in both monetary terms and technology.
Besides the myth that the government invented and constructed the Internet, the government barely has a single dollar it doesn't first take from the private sector. Nearly all of its resources derive from private sector production and taxation against that production. The government then redistributes that private sector money. Factually anything that government does, in other words, is first thanks to private money that makes it all possible.
These aren't things that necessarily require advanced AI or sensors or anything; the basic elements of cooking are relatively simple. The real issue is the vast diversity of cooking/compilation methods. In other words, automating meals could be done, but automating all meals would require something monumental.
But consider simple baked meals, which comprise thousands of recipes.
There are people in the space, but I think a commercial grade Cookbot is a holy grail for home automation.
https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/household.htm
The most time consuming activity in households is food preparation.
The other way that cookbots can be addressed is by preparing food in kitchens and then shipping it out at very low cost. Autonomous vehicles are ideal for that. The food can then either be prepared by people or robots in commercial kitchens.
At this point, the only thing that you could really automate is stirring a pot. Everything else is either too complicated or too subjective (how rare a steak should be, etc.)
I searched into this, tried to find startups that can automate my food. I'd be willing to pay a lot of money if a robot made my food exactly the way I want it, and then I can cook long meals 3 to 5 times a week. But unfortunately, the only relevant products are liquid food. There are some startups, such as Soylent, who claim their product has complete nutritional value. So you just shake their powder in water and be done with dinner in 2 minutes. I personally thought this is a distraction from the problem, but I honestly don't know how could we automate food.
People who make a point of sticking to their preferences seldom take advice.
BTW, their sales model is quite unique. There probably are no retail stores near you. Instead, they come to your home and they prepare some food for you to show you what it can do, and then you have the option to buy it.
But maybe it doesn't look like that. Maybe it's better for the robot to work 24/7 to pay off its cost, by serving many people. It can collaborate with other robots specialised in different tasks. And this we already have, it's called a factory. You can buy an enormous and ever-growing variety of partially prepared foods, where the robots have done much of the work for you.
How much of the work, well, it depends on your starting point. Ever shelled peas or plucked a chicken? Few people now do that at home, but it was once essential... our grandmothers would be astonished how little work is now needed.
Cooking the meal is the cheapest part, prepping is the most expensive.
That's ... sort of my point.
[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/mit-students-invented-a-robo... [1]https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R3216.html
With freeze dried ingredients you could much more easily create standard containers to hold chopped vegetables and protein. It's a short step to then create a machine that can create a diverse array of sauces on demand; and many cooking styles are centered around sauces. Casseroles would work similarly.
There's a niche market for freeze dried foodstuffs that caters to the survivalist community, but it's expensive. I think most preppers buy traditionally preserved items--heat drying, salted, etc. Bringing down the cost of freeze drying such that you could enable new markets would require tremendous scale, but the money is there. We just need an Elon Musk-type person to put the cash to work.
I guess I should point out that freeze drying foodstuffs substantially preserves taste and, to a lesser extent, texture. Nothing else comes close. I have a cabinet full of freeze dried, chopped herbs, including red onions and garlic; they're simply incomparable to regular dried herbs and essentially obviate the need to buy (and plan ahead for) fresh herbs. Freeze drying preserves the volatile compounds that provide depth of flavor.
I have an older Roomba and a newer BotVac, and the BotVac is slightly more clever, but it's about 10% chance that I won't find it bleeping helplessly on some new minor obstruction that it found. It's impossible to have a house where there are absolutely no cables, dropped socks, dropped toys, rugs, furniture with "tank stopper" properties, curtains that are slightly too low, etc, etc.
When my vacuum cleaner can untangle itself, I will pay silly money for something that takes care of my laundry.
After that, something that loads, unloads and sorts my dishwasher would be nice, but nothing comes close to pairing socks...
All of mine are white.
To be honest, the worst part is emptying the dustbin,which i need to do every 2-3 days.
But i forgive it whenever I see it find it's way back to the charger. It's magic.
In the end I just returned the Roomba to the store. Too much work.
https://www.husqvarna.com/au/products/robotic-lawn-mowers/
But also pricey. A couple of K for one.
That tolerance goes away when it's a high-powered 1-ton machine with the potential to kill dozens with one error, one that has to work flawlessly in a very quirky environment tuned for human perceptions and expert human users. There is no piece of software (or software-driven hardware) I've used where I'd say: "Yes, this is at a level where I'd trust it unsupervised when lives are at stake."
I think anybody expecting robot cars in the next few years will be wildly disappointed.
Lawncare involves a lot of well-defined tasks on a well-defined surface. A lawnmower bot could also have a hopper to dispense fertilizer and seed. In a more extreme, force-intensive form, it could even dispense topsoil or aerate.
In winter? Salt my driveway and sidewalk (assuming ploughing is out-of-scope for this particular robot).
I don't know if this is because lawns tend to be smaller in europe or some weird cultural pride thing, but they totally exist and are identically capable to roombas.
Carpet cleaning should also be pretty comparable - there are many sweeping ones - though the robot would necessarily be larger. I suspect the market isn't there
Stuff like these, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LlaaV2iMb0 scoots around and keeps the lawn decent, goes back to its charging station when needed.
Sci-fi is rife with humanoid robots doing everything, while all customers want is specialized products that do one specific thing well and don't cost a lot.
Robotic lawn-mowers - considering there's such a huge market for it especially in the US, I'm surprised no one has come up with a cheap robotic lawn mower yet.
There was some rumor about iRobot coming up with their own lawn mower, but that was in 2016 and we've heard nothing of it yet. https://gizmodo.com/we-can-finally-stick-a-name-on-irobots-r...
Sweeping and vacuuming, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as interesting.
For myself, every second I mow the lawn (shovel snow, etc) is a moment of my finite life forever lost :<
I suspect it _may_ be related to growing up in condos/apartments until a few years ago, and having my residence historically be a "low-maintenance base of operations" from which I do fun/interesting things; and not a "black hole of maintenance and cleanup where I spend all my time & money" that a house now seems to be :P
20 years ago, when I bought my Atco Balmoral lawnmower, the user guide said 'change the oil every 25 cuts'. So I started a small logbook to count the cuts. Now, even though I'm on a newer machine, I have 20 years worth of grass cutting data. Recently I digitised it and cross-referenced it with some local climate records. I proved to myself that in years when it rains more, the grass gets cut more. I wish I'd started logging my use of the BBQ at the same time.
I've also integrated grass cutting with leaf management, to get good mulch. One day perhaps I should blog about my overall compost management strategy.
I don't enjoy any housework and used to use a robot vacuum cleaner more or less exclusively, but it can't have been off its dock more than twice in the last 6 months. I actually enjoy doing it myself when I don't have to lug around a big heavy device with a power cord trailing out of it. Never thought I'd see the day.
What is the reason for this? I know that estates are bigger in the US than in Europe on average, but there must be still millions of families with lawns smaller than 10,000 sqft? (which is the maximum lawn size for most robots below $1500)
(Of course, there could be some bias here; many HN readers probably live in big cities)
Anyhow, one thing which I have been thinking is that given a smart home, do people rather want to talk to an abstract thing like an Alexa, or will they want to have a physical thing to which they talk to, like the vacuum cleaner. I imagine the interaction is a bit different regarding whether you just command Alexa to turn things off, rather than have a vacuum cleaner, which you can call to come to you, and still respond similarly to Alexa. With kids, I guess they'd essentially prefer vacuum cleaners, albeit I haven't really tested their reaction because the toddlers I know do not speak English for which the speech recognition stuff is mature. My peers do not expect my vacuum cleaner to either talk or listen, which it can do both, so it seems like it should also roam the room around (without cleaning objective) for others to interact with it. Given the time and artistic freedom, I'd probably buy plenty of vacuum cleaners and have them scan the campus corridors for stationary people to talk to, to essentially just see what people talk back to the robots.
Sorry if the text is incomprehensible, it is quite late.
[0]: https://youtu.be/mlAEZZ5fPbo [1]: https://youtu.be/OTlOULeNUUo
1. https://www.neatorobotics.com/resources/programmersmanual_20...
Edit: damn, they moved the document, or took it down altogether :(
https://www.irobotweb.com/~/media/MainSite/PDFs/About/STEM/C...
Weeds shouldn’t be a problem with any model as the mower will keep it down by mowing the lawn daily.
https://www.toptenreviews.com/home/outdoor/best-robot-lawn-m...
It did involve running (staking) a wire around the perimeter of the yard, as a boundary. There are a couple of tricky bits where it very occasionally gets stuck, but overall very happy with it.
The landroid cutters are strange, (think 2 inch long razor blades) and I was skeptical that it would do the whole yard. But it does. Its very slow moving, but like many robots incredibly persistent. It follows the border wire back to the charging station.
https://www.husqvarna.com/au/products/robotic-lawn-mowers/
But also pricey. A couple of K for one.
Like a robot vacuum that can handle stairs. The Roomba does a pretty decent job on a single-level, but has to be manually carried up/down stairs and someone still has to vacuum the stairs themselves.
And one that can automatically detect when it's ingested a wire would be nice, I've lost 2 USB cables to our Roomba so far.
And this guy would like his robot vacuum to detect when it's run over soft, pliable waste before it spreads it throughout the house:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/08/15/po...
It hasn't been a problem with our dogs.
Other than the fact that it was unattended, the robot vacuum was significantly worse than a regular vacuum. So I'd say there's still a ton of room for improvement and innovation in the robot vacuum market.
It hasn't completely replaced the regular vacuum, but we can run it much less frequently (like every other week instead of every other day).
Even with the issues, I feel like my Roomba is still a net gain, but it's not a slam-dunk.
"self driving" cars are effectively cars with a robotic driver. They aren't here yet but they are on the horizon.
Arguably, the car itself is a robot. "Hey robot, go pick up soandso at the airport" or "hey robot please drop off these packages at the UPS store", etc.
Robotic locks "Alexa, lock the front door".
AR technologies on phones is straight out of sci fi, but in sci fi it would have been glasses or goggles offered by a humanoid robot... but now nearly everyone's phone can do it.
The Roomba is a great example of a robot that required a significant redefinition of the "problem" of vacuuming. A normal vacuum picks up some dirt, a Dyson will pick up significantly more dirt. A Roomba barely picks up any. The secret is that the Roomba goes all over the floor many times and eventually does a job comparable to a standard vacuum, but with no human labor required. The task is also stretched in time, the Roomba takes 5x or 10x longer than a human would take to do the same job, but it's OK because it can do the work when nobody is home to be annoyed by the noise.
Industrial automation is significantly enhanced by robotics, and it does a good enough job that we just buy the resulting products at the store, not knowing or caring how they were made.
Some robots that could be made with existing tech that would save lives would be:
- crossing guard robots that scoot out into the intersection to create a physical barrier before pedestrians begin to cross, then quickly scoot back to allow cars once the light changes.
- yoga robots that stretch and massage the muscles of humans to gently improve mobility and strength.
- sex robots create companionship for those who have difficulty with human companionship.
- tiny pest control robots will detect and help exterminate rodent and insect infestations, preventing disease.
- guardian robots will accompany elderly people, always ready to catch them if they fall and to call for help if needed. Similar units will accompany children while they walk to school or go about their communities unattended by adults.
I give this a hearty recommend for imaginative cat companion-having, home-robot enthusiasts.
Electric cooktops with built in timers.
Why, oh why! does nobody build electric cooktops with built in timers?!
At least, I haven't been able to find one here in Australia at a reasonable price. I think I saw some huge six zone one with touch controls that had it, but it was $6,9999.
https://www.bosch-home.com.au/productlist/cooking-baking/coo...
Will have to have a closer look when I get home, see if there’s a 60cm model with timers.
But yeah thanks, I’ve tried looking a few times online. Admittedly haven’t been in to a store to ask.
I would happily spend double the amount of todays best Roomba if they could invent one that would simply stop when it found pet poop.
After breaking 3 robots over my knee for covering my floor in pet poo, I decided to simply not vacuum. :D
The Roomba never cleaned everything and we had to modify our home quite much to prevent it from getting stuck.
So, after the Roomba is before the Roomba, I guess.
Robots imo are less interesting than novel applications of lithium ion batteries.
It replaces your dustpan, catches bugs, is great for the car, etc. My 6 year old cleans the dinner table with it.
It improved my life like dishwashers or laundry dryers.
* a bot that just scrubs dishes and places into a dishwasher
* a stairbot that lugs heavy items up & down stairs
* a bot that separates recyclables from your trash
These are feasible with current tech IMHO.
I agree that the marketing behind these devices over promises their real-world capabilities, but if compare this marketing to that of other kinds of appliances and household products, then it is pretty much the same. Maybe totally honest accounts of product performance don't sell well because potential customers have been conditioned by marketing that promises the world?
I'll get the Scooba when I save a bit of money.
The work a roomba would manage in our appartment I can do manually within 15 minutes so it feels like a waste of money and environment.
Roombas have a HEPA filter.
But if you don't do it every day, than having one on schedule every day can still be beneficial. Specially if air quality is your concern.
If you run it very infrequently, it'll never have a chance to catch up. You also need to replace the filters every so often in order to keep the proper amount of suction.
Now I have a Neato D7 with a floor map and it does a great job.
It has its own issues but once it gets going it's better than roomba
I would argue it's much more than a demo at this point.
It does a fantastic job, especially since I have a dog that sheds everywhere. I'd compare it to a dishwasher. There's some prep and its a luxury, but I can't see myself living without a robot vacuum in the future.
I know that that thing is not able to, nor it is supposed to, completely replace cleaning up the floors. But it helps immensely in reducing the amount of dirt that accumulates day to day. This problem is even worse as I own a dog.
If I do have a complaint, is that the navigation software is a blackbox that I can't tinker with. If I could upload floor plans, or otherwise program the thing, it could potentially do a much better (and faster job).
And boy does it get tangled in power cords, or even drier sheets. That's annoying.
I'm actually debating buying a second robot vacuum for the other floor.
I actually hooked up an ESP12 to it to have internet access to the vacuum functionality, from starting a job, the raw lidar data, or manually moving it.
I wonder what thier repeat purchase rate is? I suspect it's not that significant beyond a few die hards.