Hardware is hard.
And robotics is 10X as hard.
Then make it a consumer product that no one needs. And snap, you're dead.
And robotics is 10X as hard.
Then make it a consumer product that no one needs. And snap, you're dead.
I think either it needs to be an amazing teaching tool and/or have other useful capabilities (like merging a roomba/educational robot, or merging educational/house monitoring); or the cost needs to come way down for mass adoption. I believe both have future (my dream is widespread robotics within <$10).
Getting it to come up the stairs shouldn't bee too hard, right?
The problems with consumer robotics rarely are to do with the actual mechanics. Most electrical undergrad degrees have a module where you program a robot to follow a line or course, and it's quite simple to do. The problems occur when you take it out of it's test environment and 'leave it to the elements' as it were.