Robot manipulation in unstructured situations is still not very good.
(See the videos of the DARPA humanoid challenge) "Common sense", defined as the ability to predict the consequences of actions and to use that to plan, hasn't progressed much in years. Machine learning doesn't seem to have helped much with either, so far. Those are key areas for doing physical things in the real world. Humans are good at those.
So that's where to look for hard problems.
The payoff is low, though. Those skills are common to all healthy humans, so there's a huge pool of unskilled labor available with them. If you did a startup, and you solved, say, robotic shelf stocking, it would not be a huge win over low-wage people.
Robot manipulation in unstructured situations is still not very good. (See the videos of the DARPA humanoid challenge) "Common sense", defined as the ability to predict the consequences of actions and to use that to plan, hasn't progressed much in years. Machine learning doesn't seem to have helped much with either, so far. Those are key areas for doing physical things in the real world. Humans are good at those.
So that's where to look for hard problems.
The payoff is low, though. Those skills are common to all healthy humans, so there's a huge pool of unskilled labor available with them. If you did a startup, and you solved, say, robotic shelf stocking, it would not be a huge win over low-wage people.