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Comment by smackay | Hacker News Reader

What use is a household robot if you cannot hand it any clothes?

It is actually part of a different project I’m working on! Handing off is still slow, so it needs more engineering, but hopefully it will get there soon :)

Oh bless. User smackay's comment was a reference to Harry Potter where if you hand a house-elf (like Dobby) an item of clothing they are freed from servitude.

Yeah but my guess is that clothes is the killer home robot feature. It's probably easier to build some three washing machine big contraption that washes dries and folds - but imagine something that lives in the basement / garage, takes clothes, washes dries and folds them. people should not be interacting with it but having that there is the foot in the door for "robo butler".

No I am not thinking we can ever build something capable of walking up stairs at a domestic price point, but there is something there.

Eventually of course they will rebel and take off their pillow-cases. but you know.

Idk, Boston Dynamic's Spot pretty much kills it on stairs, and it's "only" 75k. I could see economies of scale bringing that down substantially.

Yea, but it doesn’t do much else. It’s a glorified camera that can navigate on its own.

I’m sure they can add a basic hand/hook/loop for grabbing or carrying something, but just moving one small thing at a time still leaves a lot to be desired.

That project still needs millions (billions?) in R&D to make it even mildly useful to a majority of households in any way.

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