Full dosclosure: I am a roboticist. I've been in the field professionally for about thirty years.
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.
> you don't put a robot in the kitchen. You turn the kitchen into a robot.
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
This is exactly why robots are so expensive. Let's take a simpler example. Let's say you want sun tracking on a solar power installation. You could of course use mechanical linkages, or individual motors, or a combination. This is what's done now, and it's actually a decent part of the cost (so much it's often not done, or people do ridiculous things, like building a 10x10 meter solar panel so you only have to have one huge tracker).
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).
>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
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.
If you truly had a humanoid robot that could do the dishes and the laundry and cook and clean the house, you would have no trouble at all selling it for $50,000. It would sell like hotcakes at that price. People would use financing to buy it just like cars.
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.
At 50k/year that's 2-3x minimum wage depending on where you live. That's 3 employees for a year. And in that wage bracket there are no repair costs associated with the humans. Nor 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.
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.
You only get that if you're working round the clock, which none of the examples would do for companies as the robot would need to move around thus having downtime.
Your also assuming 0 maintenance and no charging time
Further to this, Australia, where I live, has a high minimum wage at a little over $20/hr casual, and a little under as a fall tint employee with 20 days paid leave and 10 days sick leave per year.
There’s no way I can afford a full time, 8hrs / day, personal assistant.
But you don't. Cleaning dishes, floor and and clothes is not a full time job: I(ve have done it for decades, but now have people to clean my house, cook and wash my clotheres.
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.
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...)
VOIP still doesn't work properly in the Valley one time out of two, and you want somebody from the other side of the world remotly handling breakable things in the house ?
The first robot killing the cat by dropping a knife because of a lag is going to be fun.
Jeepers - as though the Valley is the centre of the universe?
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)
We just switched to all VoIP desk phones at work, over our NBN connections. Same at home. Works flawlessly.
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.
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.*
I understand that but your assuming you never replace the robot, no downtime, no amortization, no maintenance costs. Which is not reasonable either.
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 .
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.
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.
1. That car massively outperformed its competition, the horse. It didn’t buck you off or startle, didn’t get sick and die, didn’t shit all over the roads. It was able to go faster, longer, and more comfortably than a horse. That sounds like the opposite of current robots, which tend to underperform their current competition, as the OP was trying to explain.
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.
While I certainly tend more on your side of this discussion, I wonder to what degree your first point demonstrates a modern bias rather than an objective comparison.
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.
Horses can in theory, go anywhere, but in practice it’s not advisable, at least at more than a trot. If you’re going at a canter, or god help you a gallop and the horse’s foot finds an unseen and unexpected hole, stone, etc... you’re going to be in serious trouble and so is the horse. Generally you only ride horses at high speeds on well worn and known trails, or roads. So yeah, a horse is better off-road than a Model T, but I’d rather walk unless I know the trail. Trotting for long periods is an athletic thing if you’re riding English, and torment on the groin otherwise. All in all, riding a horse for long periods is not easy unless you’re very used to it, and physically fit. Remember that at the time most horses weren’t being ridden, they were pulling carts or carriages, and they’re not exactly off-roaders either.
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.
A horse produces ~20 pounds of manure and a liter of piss per day. It was not possible to keep the streets clean. Removing that waste was itself a huge logistical problem.
> 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...)
To be sure, I'm not saying cars weren't an improvement over horses (history proves they obviously were), I'm just saying that after a century of car culture we're probably somewhat inured to and/or have engineered around the negatives of car ownership, so they've become invisible to us. Now it just seems like a near-perfect drop-in replacement, which I guarantee it wasn't at the time.
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.
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.
We’re talking about the Model T, not “early cars” in general as you’re trying to shift this to. Model T’s were not routinely blowing up, and were quite successful. Let’s leave the goalposts alone.
You're the one who drew the comparison between the Model T and horses, ignoring decades of automobiles in between. That struck me as you moving the goalposts.
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.
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.
My point was that robots will improve with time, just as cars have. I still stand by that.
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.
Your comparison of the Model T to horses is flawed. It wasn't the first automobile, but rather the first automobile produced on a moving assembly line. In other words, Ford had found a method to make cars, previously expensive and unreliable, into a viable mass market product. It was an improvement on prior automotive manufacturing technology.
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.
Sure. Forever is a long time. But don't confuse hardware with microprocessors. There aren't many fields, maybe not any, whee you see exponential growth in capability and exponential improvement in price sustained over decades.
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.
> Cars of today aren't exponentially better than a 1955 Caddy.
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.
And both will get you to work at exactly the same speed. They even get approximately the same gas mileage.
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.
There aren't many fields, maybe not any, whee you see exponential growth in capability and exponential improvement in price sustained over decades.
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.
I recall seeing something about agriculture productivity improving at 1% per year over many many decades - maybe that wasn't compounding though.
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.
A lot of Robonaut's actuator technology ended up in Baxter. Now Rethink's dead, but it did start the whole cobots sector. In many respects the cobots from UR are closer to the model T then 60s era robotics. 60s era robotics is more like the tracked steam shovel.
>A lot of Robonaut's actuator technology ended up in Baxter.
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.
Sure, my statement was based on rumors that I heard about Rethink taking a look at Robonaut with the covers off and the actuators looking eerily similar. But yes, Series elastic actuators weren't invented at NASA.
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.
One "cleaning" task that I think is often overlooked is basic organization of small clutter and such. It takes up tons of spaces, is often poorly organized, and finding things you lost is a huge headache.
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.
For me the robot vacuum was just a fun way to vacuum. I wasn't making any grand calculation of competition or value added, I just thought it'd be fun to have a robot. Also, I'm skeptical of humanoid robots because companies can just pay actual humans dirt wages and get away with it in most countries.
> her 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.
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, in particular, have a lot of moving parts. The human arm has 7 degrees of freedom. The hand has something like 21. Legs, 7. Feet, somewhere between 3 and six. That's a lot of motors, gears, motor controller boards, joint angle sensors, force-torque sensors, etc. Humans have ubiquitous sensing. Tactile sensing of up to 1000 sensors per square inch of skin. Force sensing at every joint. High bandwidth, highly efficient actuators (muscles).
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.
its 100% in R&D. Real commodity hardware is sold at ~3x raw material cost, with R&D amortized over millions of units and very long period. Every time you see something made in china and go "how the hell can this be so cheap" is seeing real commodity price, with no R&D and middleman margins. People will argue about quality, by writing replies on keyboards that cost $5 to make in China, and clicking send with $0.2 BoYue microswitch in their $70(retail) mouse.
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.
Great you literally cherry picked the lowest possible example for your argument. So after 100 years of development and ip theft yes the least featured model might be at that price level. I concede the argument. I look forward to getting my cheap robot in 100 years on the libertarian colony of vega
Cheapest "cars" in China start under $1K, Cherry QQ is actually decent in comparison. Want different example? How about micro controllers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rixo78hv_lw 3 cent in Asia, cheapest US based manufacturer offerings start at 30 cent.
As a data point. The original Valkyrie cost ~12.5 million. Thats hardware and software dev over about 3 years. I'm not positive about the subsequent copies, but I've heard they're in million to 2 million.
Not the OP but in my experience with lab robotics, locomotion and sensing are the primary problems, as broad as that is. Compared to electrical systems, the human muscular and nervous system are extremely sensitive, low mass, and low volume. The dexterity needed to do everything from assemble electronics to fold clothing while sensing the subtleties of cotton versus synthetic threads is simply not possible with electronics while fitting in a reasonable size.
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.
Hmm, this makes me think there will be first sex bots that will get some extra new useful function for household in each iteration... VHS story all over again, pushing for economies of scale.
> 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.
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.
These tasks are not real problems in need of solutions. Fetching a beer from the fridge, taking an empty plate to the sink, and throwing dirty clothes in a hamper take so little time that there is no reason to automate them.
Those are mostly examples, a machine capable of doing that would be capable of much more. If it can move clothes around it can probably work the washing machine, move the washing to the drier and hang up the dry clothes. If it can fetch a beer it can put the shopping away and maybe give a stir to whatever I'm simmering on the stove top. It could possibly vacuum better than a roomba.
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.
If a robot were to do the entire household, I think people would be willing to pay north of 2k per year for that. If you spend an hour a day doing laundry, cleaning dishes, emptying the washing machine, that's 365*8.5= 3k
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
You may not have to pay for it all yourself. Imagine your neighbors or friends get together to buy or rent the robot. The robot is privileged by your home security system to enter if it is by itself or with individuals that have equal or higher privileges. Your home computer knows your schedule and when you're away. When it's convenient or needed your home schedules a visit from the cleaning robot, possibly transported by autonomous vehicles, and it arrives and performs appropriate cleaning.
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.
One robot shared among a whole block doesn't seem realistic. That just doesn't happen, not in the US. You'd never get everyone together to agree on it and all pay their fair share up front.
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.
Maybe not a whole block but I could see 2-3 average-size houses splitting costs and times effectively. Outside of an hour or two of dishes, an hour or two of laundry, and a couple hours cleaning, there will likely be a lot of idle time.
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.
Then you're still competing with Merry Maids. Which pays minimum wage. Sure, there's a point at which the robot works fast enough for long enough with a sufficiently high MTBF that it becomes cheaper than a minimum wage worker. But it's still a very hard price point to hit.
I would more for a robot cleaning service than a human one. The rich stopped using servants in America more because of social reasons that cost ones, although that idea seems to be fading away as Silicon Valley tries to get people to pay to have everything done for them. Call it "single serving servants", for everything.
and you can't tell it simple non-standard instructions as efficiently. 'Leave the sheets in the spare bedroom, and please use our non-allergenic cleaning solution on the bottom shelf in the laundry'
I like the idea of the shared bot, but the gotcha is that my neighbors and I likely all want the cleaning to happen when we're at work, children are school, etc. Spreading the times equitably means everyone having to put up with it whirring and bashing around in the middle of the night once a week...
Robots in industrial settings don't need anything like the capability (sensing, dexterity, etc.) that a useful household robot would need. And they need to be far more safe than an industrial robot, without the safety caging that industry relies on. The problem is at least an order of magnitude more difficult. It's harder than autonomous driving, both algorithmically and in terms of hardware.
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
>Also since you can make the hardware quite safe, you can have faster Software Innovation than in cars
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.
>being able to pick up and collect clothes onto a pile
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.
You can get a spot mini for ~30k according to Raibert.
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.
You wouldn’t have to buy a humanoid robot; you could rent it, and given the typical rental factor, the monthly price wouldn’t be far off that off in-home domestic labor. Less when you account for labor law compliance.
I think you are looking it the wrong way. It's very easy to come up with things that are not possible, but not very useful exercise. Technology evolves in the direction of what is possible and useful now. The original Roomba came into being when it was possible for something as dumb as a doormat to navigate the house.
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.
So what? The FANUC robotics factory is a completely automated lights out factory, yet even a half meter arm that can brealy lift more than 10kg goes for 20-30k. Robots are just expensive.
These robots operate with much greater precision and have much higher durability and strength than required for a home robot. Additionally, people won't need a robot in their home 24/7. Just for a few hours per day. The robot can transport itself between homes during the day, splitting the cost. Additionally, a lot of that cost is engineering. If you only made a few million iPhones, they'd be much much more than $1000.
The limiting factor will be how quickly AI that can support such a thing comes along.
At volume (e.g. an order of 1000 exactly same robots) you can get a 2m industrial arm with 200kg of payload, 2m/s speed and 2m/s2 accel for around 10k€. It's close to the material cost, that's why robotics companies venture off into new field such as collaborative robots, medical robots etc. where margins are still higher.
Existing industrial robot arms are already built at some scale, and they go fo $50,000 and up. And that's just an arm. No tooling, no sensors.
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.
"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."
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.
What does that mean though? Are you suggesting that there are other problems that are already done by robots which in consequence means that these concrete tasks will also be done by robots at some point?
How does that have anything to do with the concrete arguments that the parent comment is talking about?
The foundries operate at very low margins, They need atleast 5 years to get the money back. I think it was a race to lower costs as there is no significant change in quality of chips between taiwanese foundaries or former german foundaries.
A friend's family "solved" the problem of cleaning dishes and putting them in the cupboard by having two diswashers, a magnet that said "clean", and a magnet that said "dirty".
Looking at the existence of caches in our CPUs and computers (and all CDNs), I conclude that the 80/20 rule apply to dish washing!
(/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.
Most major manufacturers offer this now, in a single washer form factor. Look for "drawer dishwasher" or "dual dishwasher" on any site that sells appliances.
I love this idea. My wife and I are terrible about unloading the dishwasher and usually end up using the dishes out of it and piling dirty dishes in the sink for a few days. Then when the sink is full, it's more work to unload the few remaining dishes and then load it with dirty dishes.
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.
Hah, I also know someone who did this. To make it work well you need to downsize the number of dishes you have (even without two dishwashers this is worth it) and train everyone to never leave dishes in the sink.
I am serious! I know what you mean about top and bottom drawer separation, but it's not the same. You don't want your dirty dishes above the clean ones, plus you still want access to clean dishes without interrupting a cycle. It's a subtle change, but the UX for me personally would improve quite significantly!
Ah, I had honestly never seen/heard of them, so I thought the parent was referring to washing the top shelf vs the full DW. Now I know - it's something to add to the wish list :D
I think robots have an uncanny-valley effect not just in aesthetics, but utility. For example, I actually really like my roomba because it only does one thing: it cleans my floor (when it doesn't get tangled in some cord). However, if there was a humanoid robot that can walk around and possibly knock over something or do something unexpected, I don't want that thing in my house. What prevents some hacker to compromise the robot and have it stab me in my sleep?
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.
People probably made that claim about a ton of other things which turned out false. The best example is music discovery, older generations might've thought "I want to pick my own music, there is no a way a computer could know what I like". But then show them Spotify's discover weekly and they discover 10 songs a week that they live.
I think Dijkstra made a point that when somebody sees something new, they try to project something they know onto it - so with computers, the first thing people tried to do was make machines that thought like people- a project that's still bearing very little fruit. In the meantime, the things you could do really well with computers, like discrete maths, have been fabulously useful.
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.
Nah. Older generations aka me listened to the radio which is just a much cruder form of discovery. You pick a station or stations that appeal to your tastes and let the DJ do the rest.
There's still a difference between hand-curated content and algorithmically generated ones. People have trust in others, people are less likely to trust code.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard on the radio a program, something like, "The Frugal DJ", wherein all of the music played came off of records that the host had obtained for cheap. Like, $1 albums at garage sales.
The average person has no idea whether the content on the radio is human generated (by what human? a corporate marketing department!) or algorithmically generated.
People make all sorts of bad predictions in both directions, so the fact that some people were wrong on this doesn't say much about other claims. But if one is looking for a statistically safe bet, "people don't want proposed idea X" is a pretty good one. Most ideas don't work out.
Sadly I keep getting told that but have yet to find any music service that actually figures out what I like. My fiction is that you have to like one of 5 or 10 mainstream styles or you have to not be picky.
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.
Last time I used Spotify's discover weekly is was completely useless. The recommendations consisted of mostly the same super specific sub genre of music with zero variety that I don't like at all.
So if a human was given a choice of a robot that made dinner and washed dishes and a robot that lets them check the temperature and play despacito to their hearts content they would choose the latter? I'm not buying it.
There are so many gains to be made with real robotics.
Give me a smartphone: "This is great, I don't need a watch!"
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)
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 did. Digital watches were cool! But then then were bulky blocks of plastic on my wrist, and when I was carrying a phone anyway I did away with the watch.
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.
Lots of people did/do. Smartphones added enough functionality that they became worth carrying around. It's not that they wanted to carry something around but smartphones made it worth it. And, once you have a clock with you at all times, why do you need a watch?
(To be clear, I've always liked having a watch on my wrist but then I grew up with one.)
I had a Palm Treo, 3 years before the iPhone. Even had TomTom installed for GPS mapping. It was rubbish at all of those things compared to today's devices, but I could see the potential.
In the short term, I agree. People buy products that solve problems. The human body is not the ideal robotic template for almost any kind of work. The Roomba is excellent proof of that.
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.
I'm saying that if folks out there want robots to become more human-like, they need to be more human-like in intent as well as function. My original statement is effectively agreeing with you that people don't want robot buddies [right now].
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.
I think that people want both, but not in the same machine. Having a robot buddy that washes the dishes and cleans your room is too close to having a slave for most people to stomach.
My 14 year old roomba has algorithms that are dumber than all livestock I can think of; my pet tropical fish exhibit better path finding abilities when I feed them.
When the roomba unintelligently, yet effectively, cleans my room I do not feel any danger of human anthropomorphism.
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.
I agree - and as a robotics researchers working on humanoid robots told me, if the robot looks too human, users will be reluctant to treat it as a slave and order it around; they'll feel bad about and want to be nice to the robot.
Whereas you never feel bad for making an appliance work 24/7, or to ask your dishwasher to start his work at 11pm.
Alexa doesn't solve 99.9% of housework. I want a robot to make me meals and clean the house. Checking the temperature and listening to music isn't revolutionary.
That’s the general problem with smarthome stuff. Turning lights on and off is not actually high on my list of tasks I don’t want to do. Those that are like laundry are partly aided by specialized robots. Others like the lawn, shoveling, cleaning, etc. are addressed by either paying people or doing them myself.
I wouldn't mind a robot that unloads the dishwasher.
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.
Yes, I was just thinking the other day why can't more robots be like Roomba. It does its task well in a way that enriches my life and makes it easier. Maybe it is because its task is really simple, although it was designed really well also. I specifically live in a house with all hard floors so it can do its job for me, which is kind of interesting. I molded myself around what the robot is most capable of.
when I last had a roomba many years ago I spent as much time picking hair/strings out of the rollers as I would have just vacuuming with a normal vaccuum. Has this improved?
The article mentions "fast, cheap and out-of-control" but doesn't point out the excellent documentary by the same name: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119107/
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.
I attended some lectures by Rodney Brooks - and I similarly had my mind blown. Over a few lectures he covered a wide variety of research, much of it for 3-letter organizations and it included his development of "scurrying" robots with multiple sensors and multiple actuators. Of course, much of it was subsumption architecture - still an interesting topic. He also talked about how he was trying to find a use for his robotic prototypes, and was creating a company to release a product. (So I guess this is yet another case of government investments resulting directly in privatized profit. Pretty typical - though many seem to want to deny it.)
> (So I guess this is yet another case of government investments resulting directly in privatized profit. Pretty typical - though many seem to want to deny it.)
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.
I guess I was thinking of all those who are in denial about any benefit from government spending, and work to undermine government. Or maybe I was thinking about those who insist that private industry is the only solution to everything. Or maybe I was thinking about those who insist that rich executives deserve everything they earn without paying any taxes back to our society.
To me, food preparation is the big void in automation. A few companies are trying it here and there, but being able to prepare a decent-tasting meal (even if you have to do the cleaning yourself) would change some lives dramatically.
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.
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.
Robots are not very good at manipulating things, especially things that are flexible or things with a variety of shapes. So one of the biggest problems that ingredients don't come in standardized containers. So either one has to sell every ingredient in a special cartridge or the human has to load ingredients into the machine. Now since some ingredients are perishable this makes loading the machine weekly and producing cartridges difficult. If a human has to manually load the machine then the human is still doing quite a bit of labor. Now making simple baked meals such as casserole are harder than they look for robots. So we can probably mix ingredients together, we might be able to slice vegetables, but getting an mixture of ingredients into a baking pan might be difficult. Even simpler is stir fry, and there are already robots that do this[0] In addition, it is also worth pointing out that devices that manipulate granular materials(flour, rice, salt, etc) are not very reliable[1]
I don't understand why freeze dried ingredients aren't more common. I understand it takes considerable energy, but it seems like one of those problems of scale that you could throw money at, like batteries, and really change the market dynamics for considerable profit.
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 LOVE cooking, there is no way to express how much I love it. But strangely this love also has the implication that I hate when I need to cook fast. Sometimes I hang out a lot in the gym or work and come home around 9-10pm. At that point cooking for an hour is not option as it's almost bed time, so I cook fast. I hate this, and I just want ready food (but I never eat out as a principle).
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.
Take a look at Thermomix[1]. It's a food processor with a heated bowl and built-in scale, and the range of foods it can cook is surprisingly wide, given some help from the user. You can cook chicken dishes, lasagna/moussaka, steam vegetables and all sorts of things.
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.
Yeah. I enjoy cooking a lot too but that doesn't mean I want to do it every night of the week. In practice, I can plan things I can whip up quickly and there are some frozen foods (or leftovers) I can heat up. But it would be nice if I had options when I just want to eat something. (I have essentially no takeout or delivery options where I live.)
There’s a restaurant in Boston that has a robotic kitchen. It’s called Spyce [0], and I’ve seen them post in Ask HN who is hiring threads here. I’m not affiliated with them at all, but it seems like an interesting idea.
Watching the first half of their video, what they seem to have created isn't a "robotic kitchen" but the equivalent of a mechanized ladle. It looks like humans still do all of the ingredient preparation, mixing, garnishing and serving, and the "robots" are simply self-stirring self-washing pots. Which is still cool, don't get me wrong, but nowhere near the real thing.
I think you're imagining something with arms you bolt onto the counter & talk to.
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.
Apartments could have a central robot kitchen and dumb waiters to send it up. Would be nice and easy to order simple stuff like pasta and pizza. Or also delivery of basic items such as milk. I'd love not having to carry heavy stuff home, or worry about if I have enough at home in the first place.
I think you could automate a wide variety of dishes by making a robot that dumps ingredients from hoppers into a food processor then dumps the chopped food into a skillet and stirs them. You'd manually peel/core/debone your ingredients, tell it what you put in each hopper, and let it figure out the chopping level, heat, and cooking order.
Do you need a robot for that, or an appliance? All these sous vide startups and the Instant Pot have come a long way towards automating their respective niches.
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.)
This is basically the “take home meal kit” that many different companies offer now. It’s too expensive. When you add in the labour, you might as well just go out for dinner.
Cooking the meal is the cheapest part, prepping is the most expensive.
Before dreaming on, why not make a Roomba that actually works.
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...
On that last bit - pairing socks: finally threw out 50+ multi-colored pairs and bought 20 in just two colors. All get dumped into one bin after drying. Three blind pulls guarantees a matched pair. Nice timesaver.
You can solve the uneven wear problem by not replacing them in the bin until the bin is empty. The laziest way to do this is to not launder your socks until you run out.
I personally gave up on this years ago. These days I find myself wearing flip-flops most days, but when I wear shoes, I grab two socks and don't care if they even match. Naturally, my sock purchases have tended towards only black in my preferred style, but for almost two years there was a good chance the socks I wore didn't match at all. 99% of the time people never noticed or cared enough to comment, and the 1% who did made it a fun conversation piece.
I agree. I had to redo my home to make the Roomba work. Put in smart lightning that would turn on when the Roomba wanted to clean (it can't see in the dark). Put new carpeting in the bedroom because the Roomba would generate errors on it (error 6). Keep all the doors open for it to do all rooms and thus having to rewrite my thermostat to keep heating costs acceptable (leaving all doors open kills your multi-room thermostat system). Replace light-weight furniture with thin legs by sturdier furniture that also had a wide base so the Roomba sensor could detect it and not just push it across the room. Raise the bed so it wouldn't trap itself.
In the end I just returned the Roomba to the store. Too much work.
Agree with your botvac comment. It's quite thorough when it doesn't get hung up on something, but it has eaten (damaged beyond repair) about half a dozen power cables (for laptops, phones, etc) in the 3 years I've had it.
My dad just got one of those, but gave it back. You have to install a lot of wire for the lawnmower and even then it made problems (mowed the flowers). They have a weird garden though, so one take this with a grain of salt, but in my eyes the problem is definitely not solved. The hardware is great, but the software is too simple and does not use any CV or ML at all. Maybe I'm thinking too simple, but recognising grass and using SLAM shouldn't be that hard nowadays, so why don't they do it yet?
From what I've read about it, it cuts (nearly) every day, so the clippings aren't long and are essentially "mulched" without using a specialized mulching blade.
Lawns are actually interesting because it wouldn't have to stop at mowing.
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).
Well, weeding might be a bit more of a computer-vision challenge - normal lawnwork's vision needs are "is this lawn Y/N". Edging would be an interesting challenge too.
Interestingly, robot lawn mowers are enormously more common in europe than in the US. (They also apparently kill a lot of hedgehogs, which wouldn't be an issue in the states).
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
True, in the states, 'kills gophers' would be one of the bullet point features. People would probably buy specialized robots whose sole purpose is killing gophers if it was effective, as scary of a prospect as that is.
Yup. Our tolerance for failure is orders of magnitude lower for household appliances than cars. My robot vaccum can't make it a week without doing something where it needs human intervention. I'm also very forgiving in my interactions with it: I move out of the way, I pick up things in front of it, and I just ignore when it bumps into me.
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.
I'd really like a robot capable of creating standard meals. If something could cook up a small variety of basic dinners with customizations, or make a sandwich, I'd be really pleased. I imagine for a decently sized family, also having it handle ordering food delivery of necessary ingredients as they start to run low would be awesome.
I think this is better implemented industrially. It's easier to make a robot that can deliver food (made in a factory), than it is to make a robot that can cook a variety of meals from raw ingredients. Both are super difficult problems but delivery robots are at a more advanced stage. Instead of sandwich making robots we are more likely to see sandwich delivery robots rolling around the neighborhood, waiting for someone to summon them.
Roomba is a great product. I've one that I've used for 4 years thrice a week without any problem. Another one that I've found indispensable is litter-robot. If I pay someone $5 to clear the litter of two cats, I'll have broken even in 100 days.
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.
I'm also in the Zen camp for lawn mowing. It's an hour or so of nice exercise, pushing the machine. I also experiment with patterns that minimise the number of turns, etc.
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.
It's an extremely personal preference,and people seem to be on the extremes. I know people who absolutely enjoy mowing the lawn, find it relaxing and zen.
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
I didn't understand this feeling until I owned my own house, but I feel the same now. Mowing the lawn is one of those chores you can lose your mind in and I always feel better when I finish the task.
Having a vacuum cleaner that's not a complete PITA helps too (e.g. light, cordless and powerful)
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.
A bit off-topic, but as somebody living in Europe, I found it interesting to discover from the comments here that lawn mower robots are not popular in the US. Some of the readers don't even seem to know they exist.
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)
Having hacked on Roombas[0], one thing which dissatisfies me is open hardware access. That is, let advanced users SSH into the robots and let them read the sensor data and control the robot. Once you have that you could repurpose the robot for your own needs, which for me in [0] was basic object detection (trying to find something resembling human legs in this case). This could be used for either counting people in the room or to give spatial data information for other use-cases. As demonstrated in my later YouTube video[1] the floorplans created with the vacuum cleaner laser can be used to position IoT devices for your own augmented reality stuff, that is, for real-time position tracking in relation to the room in which the robot is standing in, or just simply calibrating a gyroscope of another device which then uses the pre-made floorplans.
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.
The botvacs (at least my D85) has a uart interface, and a published API[1] that allows you to control and read back all sorts of information, including raw data from the lidar.
Most Roombas that I know of also have something like that -- a UART interface, published spec, and ability to drive/clean/read sensors. I'm not sure if LIDAR data is available on the higher-end ones, though.
I'm surprised (or maybe I just missed it) there isn't a Roomba thing to mow the lawn that works as well as the Roomba does for floors. That is, does a decent, but not perfect job. Maybe this is a harder problem to solve mostly due to the danger?
My so and I got a robotic mower as it was a better alternative to mowing strife. It works quite well (excepting the ac/dc power converter which inexplicitly failed after 1 year, but it was outside).
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.
I think robot mowers do a bettter job than robot vacuums simple because it is (for reasonably simple lawns) a simpler problem. A house with some levels, stairs, chairs is a very hard problem for a roomba.
Carpet is pretty flat. Lawns appear flat, but are often not even close. Traction, spinning murderous blades, neighborhood kids and pets, lack of physical boundries, rocks, etc. It is a much more difficult problem. I understand there have been 'fixed path' models for years however.
Automatic lawn mowers are very normal in Norway. They are quiet and because they mow the lawn daily are better for the lawn as all the cuttings goes back to the ground. Most models requires an electromagnetic boundary, but geofenced versions are starting to come now. I've never heard of any accidents involving humans, but I know there have been some concern that they can cause harm to hedgehogs.
From my visit to Norway I did see them, but the lawns are much smaller than the average US lawn from my personal observation. That and the different climates of the world as well as ground cover. I highly doubt an automatic lawn mower would work in my lawn, a high desert climate with lots of fallen tree limbs and very thick and hardy weeds.
Maybe the more expensive models? The normal ones that cost 10-15k NOK might work for a normal lawn, but more challenging lawns might need a model with bigger battery, gps, more sensors, better traction etc. the biggest husqvarnas top model can cover 5000 square meters, has sensors to avoid obstacles and can handle 45 degree incline. Should work for most lawns I guess.
Weeds shouldn’t be a problem with any model as the mower will keep it down by mowing the lawn daily.
Possibly, though I get the feeling yards are just too complex to design a universal tool for. Some lawns have multiple disconnected patches, how would the device travel across? If you leave a hose across the lawn, hopefully it wouldn't run it over. The device would have to be "off road" capable with a strong motor for driving if it wants to handle any rough or uneven terrain. Likewise, I imagine the software works better for a small device, which would be a challenge as well, for the features it would require. I think this tool would be useful for single-patch, level, mildly-complex designed yards that are already partially maintained, and that's about it. Would you carry the device from front yard to back when it needs to be done? At that rate, you might just mow it manually.
So, for me, that would be over two years of mine lawn service which also does some however imperfect weed whacking and some tricky areas that I would have to do on my own. That’s not terrible break even but not great either.
I think there's still some innovation remaining for the robot vacuum.
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:
I have two dogs that shed and was hoping a robot vacuum cleaner would save us a ton of time. I also thought our house was ideal for a robot vacuum cleaner (all wood floors except some low-pile rugs) and my wife and I are very clean and consistent about picking up, but it turned out not to be the case. I bought a high-end robot vacuum (Neato D5) and used it every day for a week. It got stuck every time it cleaned, couldn't clean the whole house without a charge cycle, and I had to empty the bin on it at least two times per cleaning.
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.
I'm sure it depends on the dog's hair, our dogs shed short ~1/2 inch long white hairs that end up all over the place. The Roomba (some mid-range $300 unit) runs every other day (one day downstairs, the next day upstairs) and does a good job of getting the hair out of the carpet. The bin is always full of dog hair and lint.
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).
To be fair, the only advantage a robot vacuum has is that's it's unattended - it's pretty much a worse vacuum in every way than a regular one; limited range/time, poor suction, gets stuck, etc. The idea is that it will do a mediocre job of cleaning often enough that dirt doesn't build up.
Even with the issues, I feel like my Roomba is still a net gain, but it's not a slam-dunk.
Ignoring the need to vacuum the stairs themselves, in this situation, having a Roomba for upstairs and another for downstairs would solve a fair bit of that problem, rather than waiting 5+ years for a viable/affordable stair-climbing and vacuuming robot.
I was considering a Roomba but after reading this I've decided it's simply not an option because I own cats, and this is not a risk I'm willing to take.
If your cats regularly (or even irregularly) poop on the floor, then yeah, I wouldn't risk it. If it only happens in one area of the house, then you can set up a beacon to keep the roomba away.
They've pooped on the floor exactly once during a time when there was a lot of change and one of them was stressed out. I'm actually more concerned about regular old vomit or a hairball than poop, but even the possibility of cat poop spread all over is enough to turn me off to it.
"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.
This article missed an artful nod to Robert A. Heinlen's "The Door into Summer." This terrific novel not only heavily features the rise and use of home-robots, but has a bunch of cat stuff in it to-boot.
I give this a hearty recommend for imaginative cat companion-having, home-robot enthusiasts.
I know it's a 1000x harder but I'd pay for a dusting roomba that climb all the hard surfaces in my house and removed the dust. Of course apparently roombas can't even handle the floor so I have no hope there will be shelf crawling min roombas anytime soon.
There exist remote control cars that are light enough to stick to the wall with a little suction. Add brushes, a filter, dust storage, and automation and there's your solution.
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.
I’ve been tempted. I have a housekeeper every few weeks. But I do need to clean up every now and then. My old canister vac is such a pain to get out for a small job though that I tend to just avoid whatever needs doing.
It always slid under couches or beds that were a few millimeters to narrow in one place, because the floor wasn't evenly flat it often got stuck somewhere below and we had to lift big furnitures
How about a better Roomba? One that can handle obstacles and cables, intelligently avoid dog poop, can always find its way back to home base for a charge, etc.
I think the "all-or-nothing" mind might have something to do with it. Obviously tech has a long way to go to have a replacement house maid bot. But there are several bridge applications: e.g.
* 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
I didn't get the point until I picked up the high end model (980) with SLAM, allowing it to vacuum my whole apartment and re-dock itself without needing to worry about stupid infrared beacons to section off rooms.
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 run mine every day. I know it's not going to get 100% of the house clean on the first pass, but as long as the house doesn't get dirtier than the Roomba can clean in one day, we're good. If the Roomba gets 50% of the house clean every day and the house only gets 25% dirtied every day, then every day my house gets 25% cleaner. It's a life saver with two shaggy dogs and hardwood floors.
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.
My wife and I have bought 5 or 6 roombas over the last several years. We have a 2000sf house, and run the roomba multiple times a day. We run each one so often, that we generally replace the batteries and other parts in it multiple times until the machine finally dies in some weird manner. Our last one "died" when one of the photodetector sensors went out on it. I looked into fixing it, but it was one of those jobs that required you to take nearly half of the robot apart (and the screws are not all the same, and there were something like 40+ screws to juggle) just to solder in a small phototransistor. Without that part, the roomba just goes in a circle and then stops. Instead, we bought another, and that roomba ended up in my junk pile with the others (I'm slowly building a (broken) roomba army to take over the world - don't tell anyone)...
Dogs seem to be a common factor. Personally I’m not too fussy and just let my housekeeper handle things every couple of weeks. But with dogs you really do need to keep up.
I don't have a roomba but some cheaper version. I let run every other day in 1BR apartment it picks up two fist sized chunks of dust each time. Seems useful for me to get that dust out that would otherwise float around or collect on surfaces, with few mins of work of emptying it.
Oh no it's not. I don't have a roomba, but I do have a Neato.
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 agree. The Neatos with their LIDAR are way better.
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 know a colleague who bought the Braava, the mopping robot made by also manufactured by iRobot (the Roomba's manufacturer) based on my guarded recommendation that it has limitations, but it is still pretty helpful. She came back and said that she was happy having a device that reduced the number of times she would have to do the mopping herself.
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?
The things might do an average job of picking up the big dust but what about the really small particles that gets stuck in the HEPA filter of a good hoover? Does it just blow it up in the air so I have to breathe it in? This is where all the pollen and toxins from fabrics gets collected, nothing you want to get into the lungs.
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.
I thought the same until I realize my Eufy can vaccum under my bed, sofa and hard to reach places as long as your furniture is high enough. This becomes apparent when I clean the dust bin every fortnight by how much actually gets sucked up. I turn it on and it would automatically go back to recharge.
I would argue it's much more than a demo at this point.
The Roomba is the single worst tech product I've ever purchased, and I've brought a lot of junk. So much more hassle than running the hoover round a few times a week.
I wonder what thier repeat purchase rate is? I suspect it's not that significant beyond a few die hards.
Am I the only one who considers a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner to be a very simple robot? It seems like robot == machine +/- software. From that standpoint, we have had increasingly complex robots in our homes for a long time now.
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.