I have to say I'm kind of baffled about all these companies complaining "Regulation is hurting self driving cars!" and "Regulation is hurting drone delivery!" when there are pretty much zero barriers to enter the consumer robotics market for a machine that dusts your house, does your laundry, does your dishes, picks up clutter from the floor, etc.
(And yes I realize these tasks involve surprisingly hard AI problems, but why isn't Google already running pilots where they give people special washing machines, laundry machines, robot-friendly book shelves, etc etc that help mitigate the hard AI aspects of the problem?)
In 'serious academic' robotics, if you only have one hokuyo urg lidar [1] and one xsens mems imu [2] you're on a low budget project and you'll probably need a bunch more sensors before your product can operate reliably unattended. But you've already spent ten times the cost of an entry level roomba.
The kind of butler robot we can make today [3] would seem extremely expensive for the functionality it could offer, making it hard get the sales needed to recoup your up front engineering costs - let alone to achieve the economies of scale needed to bring down the price on those sensors.
Thanks for the links; I love this stuff. I can see the laser rangefinder [1] being expensive. But what makes the xsens gyro/accelerometer [2] so expensive compared to a smartphone sensor, and why does a robot need that?
Accurate heading info requires good gyros and is moderately expensive.
It's a lot cheaper than it used to be. When we did our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle ten years ago, we had about 3 degrees of heading noise, which kept the system which integrated LIDAR data into a terrain map from reliably mapping. The system had a MEMS gyro with too high a drift rate, and a magnetometer compass for long-term correction. But there were enough magnetic fields from the onboard equipment to mess up the magnetic compass. The software could detect trouble, and would stop, tilt the laser head to scan the terrain ahead and get a clean image, then advance. So the vehicle kept stopping to rescan.
We looked into better heading gyros, but they cost about $20K at the time.
If you think that's expensive, have a look at an OXTS RT3000 [1] where you can spend closer to $20,000 - that's the sort of thing you buy for your prototype self-driving car. Or at least, it was when people were competing in the DARPA Grand Challenge eleven years ago.
Applications for IMUs include dead reckoning (working out your position based on rotation and acceleration measurements), orientation sensing (figuring out which way is down is much easier than dead reckoning, because you can just sense gravity), and compensating sensor readings for robot motion.
Some cheap sensors aren't very precise; you won't notice if your phone thinks it's rotating two degrees a minute around the vertical axis, but a robot will if it moves for five minutes then it's ten degrees off course. I haven't looked at the market for a long time - I suspect the cheaper IMUs are better nowerdays. Eight years ago they didn't offer very good precision and the open source software could be very fiddly to get working, if you could get it working at all.
At the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, the IMU/GPS unit that CMU's team used required 4U of rack space and air conditioning. There's been a lot of progress since then. The ADXRS642 MEMS gyro[1], which costs $50 in quantity, has a drift rate of 20°/hour. Ten years ago, you were lucky to get 20°/minute from a MEMS gyro. If you're doing sensor integration while moving, you need a stable orientation reference. Alternatively, you can use SLAM to process video and align to the world, which works well today.
The OXTS RT3000 has impressive specs - 1cm accuracy in world coordinates. That's better than you need for most robotics applications that aren't running blind. The Trimble AP10 [2] has the same functionality at much lower cost, but is not as accurate.
A lot of progress in robotics comes from component improvement like this. There was a time when just getting a wireless data link to your robot was a big deal.
Yeah that thing seems way overpriced, or at least far too high-spec for most applications. Quadcopter flight control boards containing gyros and accelerometers can be had for less than $20, and those do just fine.
If you need expensive sensors and other parts, the unit economics for domestic robots don't make sense; a single robot would cost too much for any single family to justify, compared to just hiring someone to do the laundry once or twice a week. A delivery drone, on the other hand, would be used all day by some business, so a large upfront investment makes sense.
Really regulation is critical for the success of self-driving cars. Nobody is going to want to buy self-driving cars if there are ones that get into lots of crashes so I think we're going to get into the same situation we have with the FAA where the big players all want the regulator to have real teeth.
Consumer robotics doesn't have much of an entry barrier but as other have pointed out the components you need mean that prices are going to be in the $X0,000 range. That's too much for consumers but I think we're going to be seeing robots in warehouses soon.
"Really regulation is critical for the success of self-driving cars. Nobody is going to want to buy self-driving cars if there are ones that get into lots of crashes..."
If I were a car manufacturer and nobody wanted to buy my cars because they were seen as dangerous, I might try to make my cars safer to increase my sales, even if the law didn't require it.
You might, but that costs money, and other market players are always invented to undercut you.
Because the line of how much is too much is indistinct, someone is going to guess wrong before too long. This is even before you mix in perverse organizational incentives involving short-term view or individual profit vs long-term company health.
I agree. What about a robot that simply move clothes from the washer to the dryer? That's a pretty well defined tasks and is basically 50% of the work of doing laundry.
All-in-one units exist that just have a single front-loading tub. It seems they're designed primarily for where space is tight, so I suspect there are some tradeoffs.
But as someone else said, that's probably the step associated with doing laundry that's the least effort. Putting clothes away is the biggest effort and good luck designing a robot to handle that.
Clothes can sit in the washer for hours. :-) I transfer when I'm walking by to go to the bathroom. Actually, with my AppleWatch, I usually unload dishwasher, washer/dryer when I'm told to stand up and move for a minute.
Simple: they lack leadership. A proper leader would focus on setting the framework for autonomous machines to operate. Without leadership, all they can do is showcase shiny greenfield projects.
(And yes I realize these tasks involve surprisingly hard AI problems, but why isn't Google already running pilots where they give people special washing machines, laundry machines, robot-friendly book shelves, etc etc that help mitigate the hard AI aspects of the problem?)