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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

If you narrowly define robots as arms, wheels, or floating eyes, then yeah, you're going to have a tough time.

My kitchen is full of cheap, perfect robots. A microwave with cook sensor, a fridge that makes ice, a coffee pot with timer and brew settings, a pressure cooker that somehow cooks everything perfectly all the time.

In my garage I have a door opener, a clothes washer, a clothes dryer, some motion sensing lights.

In my backyard I have a sprinkler set that waters the lawn.

On and on ...

Those are the killer robotic apps, and we've been refining them for 100 years. When I teach classes, I honestly get a laugh when I say that the toaster is the most perfect robotic design of all time from a customer service perspective.

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In that case, what is the difference between machine and robot? The word loses its meaning.

Most of those execute a fixed program with no feedback. The hallmark of robotics, as I understand it, is complex feedback mechanisms. Robotics classes at my school were 80% control theory.

I think it's a difference of degree, not kind. And, as you suggest, the degree of onboard control / adaptivity is probably a good spectrum.

As things become more simple and robust, I would argue the degree of adaptivity will necessarily decrease, because adaptivity is required to handle situations off nominal, and those can and should be designed around.

Perhaps a toaster is a machine because it toasts for 2 minutes (or whatever it is present to) while a robotic toaster takes the bread and toasts it until it's done?

Those appliances are perhaps robots in the broad sense sometimes used in the field of robots, with a definition something like "any machine which can replace or assist any physical task ordinarily done by humans." But most of them are not robots in the sense generally used by laypeople, which is a definition more like "a machine which can accomplish some general class of physical tasks normally done my humans by moving around in and manipulating objects in an environment which has not been heavily modified for the robot."

I could really use one that takes the tedium of chopping/prepping food without my direct control or supervision.

Introducing.. THE SLAP CHOP!!!

But actually, a food processor. It isn't 'quite without direct control or supervision', but the direct control is more like loading feed-stock and the supervision level is similar to using an oven: you're mostly there to make sure things don't go incredibly awry. I used to think they were kind of goofy in a home kitchen and had only ever used one at work, but after developing RSI in both wrists and working on dinner at a friends house I started to see the value. Want to make fancy mac n cheese? Pop that block of the good stuff in, shredded fast. Same deal for hashbrowns. Or really any vegetable you need to have some coarse/fine chop applied to.

time to reclassify the slap chop as a prosthetic device :)

That's not a broad definition of robotics, that's a redefinition of robotics as a synonym of mechanics.

I agree. And posit the other direction: Robotics has over-hyped and over-focused the field of mechanics on "Things with mobility and too much software" much to its determent.

Simplicity (at least simplicity of functionality and presentation) is best if you want ubiquitious markets, I think.

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