Dead end. You can't redesign and replace the entire world.
It's the same issue as self-driving cars: universal worker robots have to either learn to use the same things humans do, or never leave the labs.
It's the same issue as self-driving cars: universal worker robots have to either learn to use the same things humans do, or never leave the labs.
Step in a car factory, plenty of robots but none of them are humanoids. We redesigned the whole factory around specialized robots, rather than have humanoids on a Ford-like moving assembly line.
GM's Saturn was relatively early in that space but it didn't scale up anywhere as well as they had hoped. Likewise, Tesla went there 30 years later, but IIRC, they too experienced myriad difficulties building reliable automated manufacturing processes.
If automation among makers were ready for prime time, the work would have migrated to countries with the cheapest power and fastest mobility while ignoring labor costs. AFAIK, that still hasn't happened.
I mean, think about the batshit idea of raiway transport in Europe. Like trains sound nice in principle, sure, it works on the scale of a mine or a shipyard to move things around, but using that to travel between all major cities (and even most villages) and countries all over? It would require laying thousands and thousands of kilometers of train tracks.
Or introducing electricity and phone lines, public lighting, and adopting various standards, metrification, putting road signage everywhere, etc. etc.
We've done a lot of large scale transformations. But to kickstart the process, robots need to be "good enough" without these infrastructure changes, and then people will see it and want the change. You can't start speculatively. It has to work first, and offer to work better if there is more infra standardization.
Which at that point is really just the Japanese train system and surrounding infrastructure, which many places (at least in the US) don't seem capable or willing to make happen.
They even ran on things like firewood, coal, or, for the first ICEs, relatively common liquid fuels that could be sourced in large cities.
Cars rely on gas stations today - but gas stations only became a thing after cars already became a thing.
Nowadays, Tesla had to make Superchargers happen all by themselves before EVs could really happen - despite EVs already having the crushing advantage of being able to charge overnight in any garage that has power.
Can you see a robot company branching out to be a competitor to McDonalds to prove that their kitchen robot is viable if you design the entire kitchen for it? Well, it's not entirely impossible, but I think it unlikely.
From that to every manufacturer adopting the standard on every product, independently of the client you just need some competition on their market. I dunno if there is any, but it's not a lot.
But to me thats the end state of this conversation. Like lets take shipping as an example, we came up with pallets and containers not because they're useful for a person to move but because they're helpful for robots (and analogs) to move. People aren't born with palletjacks for hands. So to me it seems as you add more robotics into the kitchen you're going to slowly change your supplies to arrive in more robotic form.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/11/08/happy-bi...
We changed the layout, the material, added guardrails and guide posts etc.