Once a technologically advanced product becomes truly useful and reliable, it's not a "robot" anymore. It's a dishwasher. It does one thing and does it well. General purpose robots are fundamentally too expensive to be mass-market useful!
Our goal as engineers should be to found the next dishwasher company, not the next robotics company.
> Our goal as engineers should be to found the next dishwasher company, not the next robotics company.
So I have thought about this a lot, and I even started and failed an ambitious robotics company, and I feel like a good niche product that could make a profitable company is self-cleaning litter boxes.
No, it won't be a multi-billion dollar company (at least not just with that product), but there is definitely a market for this and the current products are underwhelming. And technologically, it is about as approachable an unsolved robotics problem as you can find.
I know that one got canceled, but they're going to relaunch. Apparently a backer pointed out a design flaw (my girlfriend backed this project and has already been refunded her pledge but plans to back them again when they relaunch).
I agree with you for the short term. Advancing robot tech in general is better served by aiming to be the best X for a limited set of X.
A truly generic robot is probably several steps away and I think the correct niche for starting to approach that market appliance would be a human-scale (and moving) tele-operated human-shaped robot body. That would be useful for all of the places that humans are expected to navigate and particularly useful for situations involving danger.
I think we're decades into the era of that kind of "robot" and on the horizon there is a world with more general purpose robots. By that I mean, the mindless rote tasks are mostly already served by mechanical devices, like dishwashers, luggage carousels, various manufacturing "robots", etc. (this list could go on for days, if we've decided that all forms of automation is a robot). There isn't a hole for a "dishwasher" (where "dishwasher" is a placeholder for whatever simple rote job it fulfills) robot in the market today.
You have to look a little higher up the complexity scale, for roles that require low skill but high something else (so humans are hard to find to fill the role). e.g. say you need deliveries in a building, or even at the neighborhood or city-block level. It's repetitive, boring, work that is hard to hire for but can plausibly be done by a robot. It's hard to hire for because it is repetitive, boring, and requires a level of trust and reliability that a low-paying job doesn't really inspire in human workers. Delivery is a huge industry, when you consider all the scales at which delivery takes place (from tube systems and intraoffice mail systems on up to freight on trucks, trains, and boats), which could support dozens of designs of robot, and some of them are probably most usefully shaped like and acting like what we think of when we think "robot".
"Delivery robot" is still pretty special purpose, I guess...you could say it's a dishwasher, but it's a very smart, very expensive, dishwasher. It needs a lot of skills to do the job, and the closer it gets to the human it is delivering to, the more it probably should look like a friendly humanoid(ish) "robot" rather than like a self-driving truck (of varying sizes, based on role). A truck can't navigate elevators and doors, for example.
Our goal as engineers should be to found the next dishwasher company, not the next robotics company.