I don't think this is the killer app for robotics.
I think the killer app - and something I would pay for immediately - is a moveable platform programmed to travel between waypoints.
So, a platform that stays level regardless of terrain and you put stuff on it and tell it to go to the (living room, backyard, carport, barn, whatever).
I arrive home with a load of groceries and I put four bags on this platform and press the "kitchen" button.
That's it. Just a magic box that transports (slowly) things to places around your yard/property/warehouse.
I share your sentiments. A simple (hah!) robot that can carry ~20-50lb loads while traversing suburban/urban terrains and navigate stairs between two pre-set points. Would make a huge difference for those that are elderly and/or have some limited mobility. Hell, I would buy it just to have one less thing to worry about when I'm with the kids.
Work with boston dynamics to make the Spot robot arm into a self-leveling gimbal table, and let the robot run around your house, and I think you're golden. Make it respond to voice commands, and you'll be even shinier.
Float? That’s extreme. If you are concerned about children and pets (i.e. moving objects) then you just need it to not put down its foot where something is - it can just pause until the object has moved out of its way.
put a robot arm on your robot table, along with an avocado, onions, cilantro, salt and pepper, (edit: lime!) and have it make guac on the way to my table!
I think people vastly underestimate the amount of fetching and cleaning that goes into cooking. If you can load all that onto a table, a knife + arms are doing the easy part.
The author is primarily focused on the cost of hardware, while ignoring most of the challenges of software (folding clothes, the dishwasher, whatever) by saying software companies will figure it out with AI.
A low speed, low accuracy robot was tried with Rethink Robotics, founded by the Roomba guy (Rodney Brooks), who tried to compete with Universal Robots and got their clock cleaned. Nobody in industry wanted a slow, inaccurate robot, even at a good price.
What's holding us back in robotics is not the cost of hardware. There are plenty of use cases of $40k robots that are still not pursued because engineering special end effectors and integration is too difficult, not because of the cost of the robot. Reducing the cost of the robot to $10k makes no difference in those applications because it's not the gating factor.
The idea that companies will just figure out folding clothes and other complicated tasks because the cost of hardware falls is, I believe, fanciful, but I hope I'm wrong. Maybe "AI" will hand-wave solve it.
I instinctively want to agree with you, but isn't it possible that throwing orders-of-magnitude more engineers at these kinds of problems will eventually get them solved, but right now nobody is doing that because the hardware is too expensive (and the market thus perceived to be too small)?
I think robotics is a field where there are magnitudes of more engineers than required. Look at the college enrolment in robotics vs the actual jobs that are there in market. I would say less than 10-20%(just anecdotal data, correct me if wrong) of the students who study robotics work in proper robotics jobs.
I would imagine that the bottleneck for breakthroughs is more the number of robotics Ph.D.s and robotics engineers with 5+ years of experience. A bunch of bachelor's grads aren't going to help advance the field if they don't even get a first job in the field.
As noted, there are a lot of robot engineers out-there. Maybe tossing them all together would help but massive engineering projects tend work when the outline of what to do is known and the many teams can fill-in the details. It doesn't seem like we're there now. Notably, every single entrant in Darpa's two legged robot failed to complete the course.
Also, if someone was throwing that many resources at a given problem and it was to sell pretty cheap robots, how would they get their money back? Lots of expensive tools sport expensive software.
If you narrowly define robots as arms, wheels, or floating eyes, then yeah, you're going to have a tough time.
My kitchen is full of cheap, perfect robots. A microwave with cook sensor, a fridge that makes ice, a coffee pot with timer and brew settings, a pressure cooker that somehow cooks everything perfectly all the time.
In my garage I have a door opener, a clothes washer, a clothes dryer, some motion sensing lights.
In my backyard I have a sprinkler set that waters the lawn.
On and on ...
Those are the killer robotic apps, and we've been refining them for 100 years. When I teach classes, I honestly get a laugh when I say that the toaster is the most perfect robotic design of all time from a customer service perspective.
In that case, what is the difference between machine and robot? The word loses its meaning.
Most of those execute a fixed program with no feedback. The hallmark of robotics, as I understand it, is complex feedback mechanisms. Robotics classes at my school were 80% control theory.
I think it's a difference of degree, not kind. And, as you suggest, the degree of onboard control / adaptivity is probably a good spectrum.
As things become more simple and robust, I would argue the degree of adaptivity will necessarily decrease, because adaptivity is required to handle situations off nominal, and those can and should be designed around.
Perhaps a toaster is a machine because it toasts for 2 minutes (or whatever it is present to) while a robotic toaster takes the bread and toasts it until it's done?
Those appliances are perhaps robots in the broad sense sometimes used in the field of robots, with a definition something like "any machine which can replace or assist any physical task ordinarily done by humans." But most of them are not robots in the sense generally used by laypeople, which is a definition more like "a machine which can accomplish some general class of physical tasks normally done my humans by moving around in and manipulating objects in an environment which has not been heavily modified for the robot."
But actually, a food processor. It isn't 'quite without direct control or supervision', but the direct control is more like loading feed-stock and the supervision level is similar to using an oven: you're mostly there to make sure things don't go incredibly awry. I used to think they were kind of goofy in a home kitchen and had only ever used one at work, but after developing RSI in both wrists and working on dinner at a friends house I started to see the value. Want to make fancy mac n cheese? Pop that block of the good stuff in, shredded fast. Same deal for hashbrowns. Or really any vegetable you need to have some coarse/fine chop applied to.
I agree. And posit the other direction: Robotics has over-hyped and over-focused the field of mechanics on "Things with mobility and too much software" much to its determent.
Simplicity (at least simplicity of functionality and presentation) is best if you want ubiquitious markets, I think.
This was essentially Willow Garage's pitch with the PR2, like a decade ago. Obviously they were several orders of magnitude off on the price point, but that was the idea— an "appable robot" with standard hardware that everyone would rush to write new capabilities for.
The home is always going to be a nightmare environment for this kind of thing, though— even without the mundane issues of stairs, doorknobs, appliances with varying interfaces, and hazards like pets and clutter, there's just far too much breadth of potential tasks to want it to do.
Later companies understood that zeroing in on a few tasks to do well and repeatedly (delivery, laundry, floor-cleaning, etc), in ADA-compliant environments (hotels, hospitals, airports), was a much less scary place to start.
"home is always going to be a nightmare environment for this kind of thing"
We have two choices: 1) Design robots for places optimized for humans, or 2) Design places optimized for robots -- a future where the living space (and all the machines and other things in them) are redesigned from scratch for the robot that will cook, clean, and move around there. Then a second priority is making it comfortable enough for the humans to also live there, too.
I suspect it's easier to adapt a human to an environment optimized for robots than it is to adapt a robot to an environment optimized for humans.
We replaced a $15 land line with a $1,100 iphone and got multitudinous other benefits. Replacing human centric habitation space with human+robot centric spaces seems like it would have similar outsized benefits. For example, maybe dishes never need to be cleaned by water if you have a robot willing to manually scrub them for 8 hours. Indeed, maybe your robo chef can also sterilize the "counter" so you just eat right off of it.
As someone who enjoys soup, I can find a couple flaws with that plan.
My biggest problem is that if that world comes out of the current one, it's going to be one heavily mediated by capitalism (just like everything on my iPhone). So, yes, the robot could scrub the dishes. But once I've accepted that relationship with my robot, version 2 comes out and it has a feature where it doesn't need to spend 8 hours doing dishes because it includes a free trail of the $20/month dish subscription and just throws them out and signs for the shipment of new ones that comes while I'm away at work.
Whatever the exact scenario, the environmental cost will be huge. The COST cost will be huge. And probably the robot will be reporting the details of what I ate and what stayed on my plate back to the company to sell on to the ad sales branch of the company
At that point, why even bother with all the interface hassles of having it work with a mobile manipulator? If you're already getting semi-custom equipment all over the place and designating robot exclusion zones within your house, then you probably have the cash and floorspace to go all in on special-purpose labour saving devices like a washer/dryer combo that loads directly from the chute and can run itself.
But once you begin describing that, it's clear how absurd it would be to install it all for use a few times a week.
Home mobile manipulation will never be a thing until it can use the existing HMIs.
>Replacing existing human spaces with robot-optimized spaces would make robots significantly more expensive than basically any other approach.
Houses built over the past 50 or so years are designed to disintegrate over 50 or so years and be rebuilt anyway. Although demand for new construction is reduced by the way that neighborhoods tend to go from high income to low income as the buildings physically disintegrate, there is a lower limit somewhere, and redevelopment will happen everywhere eventually.
> Houses built over the past 50 or so years are designed to disintegrate over 50 or so years and be rebuilt anyway.
This may happen in places, but in any case building larger (to accommodate robots) spaces is not a way to make the robots more cost-effective or drive adoption.
Locomotion on flat floors covered in furniture is one problem out of many, and if redesigning all the other parts of the human environment solved all the other problems, researchers would only have one problem left.
Why not both? Design smart houses with special rooms for the robots.
Automated kitchen - place a bunch of ingredients regularly or right before ordering a meal, pick up freshly made food of your choice (or what's possible).
Automated laundry - dump dirty clothes, pick them up washed, dried and ironed (probably the hardest part heh).
Automated garage with charging/fill up, maintenance checks, washing?
Will need a lot more space, so it would be only for the rich, at least at first. A common automated kitchen for an apartment complex might be possible.
And better make them very reliable or maintenance can be a nightmare.
Hmm, the automated garage is actually a damn good idea. Shouldn't be too hard to program a robot to remove valve caps and top up tires, check tread depth, wipe bugs off the windshield and bird droppings off the paintwork. Maybe even pop the hood and check/replenish fluids.
It could totally be both. Boston Dynamics' Spot is already doing a good job navigating a human's world, but I also could see home goods manufacturers making new versions of their products "Spot-optimized".
I am dubious about the last line regarding maintenance making it into reality though.
Given current track records on "planned obsolescence", "right to repair" and McDonalds issues with their frozen machines I suspect such maintenance will be the new "subscription".
No. We're building houses for humans. We're not building a robot retirement home. Design it for humans first, or you're going to wind up with a really crummy place for humans to live.
Thats it! Calculator heaven! Put the humans on wall-e style seats on conveyor belts and circulate them though the laundry station, restaurant, bath house etc, then periodically detour them though more exotic shops and museums to eventually drop them off at their cubical or bed room.
If we're talking about massive retrofits or greenfield projects, then that's sounding even more like it's a fit more for hotels and stuff than some kind of Henry Ford "one in every driveway" model.
The problem with the author's vision is that geared brushless servo actuators like the Gyems they used, all generally similar to the original MIT Cheetah actuators (or steppers, another popular motor) require precision low-backlash gearboxes with large bearings and servos with high-speed control electronics. They also need high-resolution force/torque sensors to be collaborative capable, and if you require it to not fall down when E-stopped, you need brakes. All of that has become impressively cheap for what it is, but scale and progress can only do so much - that hardware will always be expensive.
The problem is they're starting this effort from the basic joint being an electric motor. When you start there, this all follows as what you have to do to build a robot, you're forced into a corner in your design. Instead, it's far better to have the safety and operation come inherently from the way the product is designed.
I saw an impressive demo at an automation conference about a decade ago, it was a cobot where the motion was based on inflation of pneumatic bladders. It functioned similar to the way biological muscles work. It did not need gear reduction, or force sensors, or brakes, or high-speed amplifiers. If it ran into something (or something ran into it), it didn't strip gearboxes, the bladder just complied.
I think that will be the 'killer cobot' someday, but it's going to be hard to impossible to launch into the industrial space.
It seems robotics suffer from the same problem as AI: every-time it advances and come into contact with the public, it becomes something else.
I explain: we already have an incredible successful robot. It’s the roomba (and it’s imitators). It’s a robot, but suddenly it’s not the robot we’ve all been waiting for.
Just as Siri and Alexa and Google Assistant suddenly are not widely seen as AÍ because, even when they can talk, recognize your speak, search for content and do some tasks, they are not the artificial intelligence we have been waiting for.
It seems we’ll always raise the bar, no matter what.
200 years from now, taking, walking, autonomous smiling android: not a robot.
Now I have an image of Gyro Gearloose's little helper as a robotic dildo with tiny arms and legs. I presume this will be a thing someone implements... eventually.
This kind of completely horrifies me, but it's also not the worst idea I've ever heard.
I was more convinced by the author's pitch than I thought I'd be, but the problem I see is that the technology just isn't quite there yet. Thus it'll probably come out to be more like the early PDA's than the iphone.
Still, the general direction could have more promise than my first judgement of it based on the title.
There is a fascinating, low-budget (almost ruined by its abysmal CG) movie from the 2000s called Sleep Dealer that deals with exactly this. I remember thinking it was unrealistic at the time, but given my presently much greater appreciation for the difficulty of robotics AI, it now seems prescient.
If that's the only reason then everyone with one of those smart speakers will buy one (smart speaker? haha, why not smart microphone?). However it does seem like there will be a lot of objections to having a person looking through a camera among a certain demographic who seem to put more faith in giant companies that employ people who they feel are people like them than they do in people who they do not feel are people like them. Let me try to phrase this more clearly. To someone who imagines Google as several thousand of themselves, having a Google microphone in their houses feels like having themselves in their house. To someone who imagines an Indian operator as very much not themselves, it would feel differently.
Well mainly because telerobotics still sucks. This is a hard problem. We haven’t devoted enough effort to solve it on a practical level beyond tech demos in academia.
The operators deliberately cannot, as we had to keep explaining when this came up on HN previously, drive Waymo's cars remotely.
They can reach into the car's model of the world to help it understand e.g. this thing that you decided is an ambulance is actually not an ambulance, so you don't need to treat it like one. Or, very simply, that road is shut, don't try to use it.
That seems like less of a distinction than you make it out to be. For regular people, the difference between driving and conducting is slight. For engineers and the implementation details it's a huge deal of course and makes a massive safety difference.
I believe teleoperation will have a huge role indeed. It will be there in any case for remote support, but for startups it may make sense to start fully teleop until they nail autonomy.
> Seriously, look at the UR5, when was the last time you loaded a dishwasher with 0.1 millimeter precision? Or which kitchen appliance did you use for 35.000 hours at full capacity? Or what clothes weigh 5+ kilograms?
The author underestimates the physical requirements for most tasks we do day to day. 0.1mm precision is roughly the accuracy you need to put a #8 screw into a clearance hole toleranced for a loose fit. One might think when loading a dishwasher that you don't need to be precise because the dish can go "anywhere", but in reality that's just because a human fundamentally understands where plates can and can't go, and can adjust their movements accordingly. If you are trying to place a dish on a granite countertop, and the plate goes 0.1mm into the countertop, you're going to notice. Such a robot arm would just barely be able to peel a potato.
5kg of payload may sound like a lot, but it really isn't. For starters, that doesn't include the weight of the end effector. Then this is the max load that the robot can support, but if you need to manipulate something quickly and precisely, that further reduces max payload. Holding a single item of clothing should still be fine, but what about say pulling on an item of clothing out from under a pile of laundry? Or how about lifting a pot of water off a burner on your stove? Pouring a glass of milk from a gallon jug would be close to the limit of what such an arm can handle.
> Low cost: Less than 1000 USD for the robot hardware.
I'm not sure where this figure comes from. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Apple ][ cost ~ $6,000.
> Previously shown off to a few thousand rabid fans at the West Coast Computer Faire, the Apple II’s arrival means the masses can finally get their hands on the breakthrough machine. A base unit costs $1,298 — the equivalent of $5,810 in 2021 money.
Maybe all it takes is a good, but overpriced robot selling for around $6,000. The high cost of Apple's first computers was a major driver for a work-alike computer market that included Atari, Commodore, TI, Coleco, and Tandy.
If the Marketplace Disruption view of PC history is any guide, I suspect the first wildly successful robotic product will cause professionals to turn up their noses in disgust at the triviality of it all. They'll bemoan the lack of practical applications. They'll cluck at all of the things it can't do. Meanwhile, a small group of buyers will find the toy-like things irresistible. This product might have already been introduced.
Also, it's instructive to consider all of the things that were predicted for home computers vs. how things ended up turning out. Many of the concepts were sound (games, recipes), but few thought of the role a ubiquitous, worldwide, fast network infrastructure would play in creating entirely new classes of uses for small computers. And almost nobody predicted the astonishing rate of miniaturization/performance increases that would occur and which continues to this day.
I honestly think there's a lot more runway for single-purpose "smarter" appliances than general-purpose robots.
The "iPhone of Robotics" probably looks more like personal ownership of several robots: Roomba, iLaundry, iFoodPrep, iPutAwayGroceries, iPutAwayDishes, etc. iRobot has built a solid business reasonably automating a single household chore. I would bet an all-in-one laundry machine or bathroom cleaning robot could also do compelling sales.
At a minimum, it seems very ambitious to try to attempt to solve via robotics problems that are not well-solved using single-purpose machines.
Absolutely. Our conception of robot is fixated stupidly on things with arms and eyes.
The toaster is a perfect robot. I mean perfect. A more modern example is my smart pressure cooker that does just about everything in closed-loop control. It's fantastic.
Automation is not only a very old practice, it's actually stagnating relative to the amount of magic miracle appliances that appeared in the first half of the 1900s.
My toaster cooks the bottom part of the toast way faster than the top part so I have to flip it partway through to get it even. Also it accumulates a ton of crumbs which I can never quite clean out, and sometimes some crumbs will get onto the heating element and the kitchen will smell like burning. Plus it's just not at all consistent even though it seems impossible for there to be so much variance with the same machine cooking the same bread on the same time setting.
Why do I have to put the bread in the toaster? A toaster should load itself.
And half the time I can't get the toast out without using a knife. Why doesn't the bread come up to a level where I can pull it out without burning myself?
Why can't it ever toast the right amount? It's always too much or too little. It should be able to determine everything it needs to about the bread to toast at the correct level, no trial and error and no wasted slices.
In fact, I disagree with your statement so much that I'd ask the question, why are toasters so shitty?
We already have accepted robotic vacuum cleaners. Why not simply expand on that idea with adding simple manipulators on top of them: put away the shoes, pick up socks, empty the pet litter, …
If there were robots capable of reliably doing that you’d see them on the market already. Picking things up, identifying them and applying the right force and such isn’t an easy problem.
By the way there are already self cleaning cat litter trays and they’re absolutely awful and prone to poop-related bugs. I’m not sure any robot could reliably react to the developing situation of having a wet turd on the litter scooper.
I want someone to build a collection of small IoT robots that can be customized to perform very small specific actions. The purpose of these robots would be to bridge the gap between analog human actions and the digital world, without requiring that everyone get a "smart toaster/oven/lightswitch/etc".
For example, you might have a little robot that can have an attached rotary gripper, for ensuring that the stove top is off. It sits on the stove knob and can turn it based on some input. Or one that can open a deadbolt from the inside. Or one that can brace against a door frame and turn a door handle. You could even include a tiny, low resolution camera that can snapshot the current state of the thing that the robot is controlling.
Having these devices be adaptable, with different attachments, would be important to making sure they work in the most situations. Whatever attachments you put on, and how you position them, are unique to whatever analog device you are interested in controlling. Some could brace themselves against the surroundings, some could be screwed into a wall. The key is options.
I want an appliance that combines the functions of refrigerator, pantry, stove, oven, dishwasher, and that has manipulators inside capable of picking the ingredients, cleaning, peeling, chopping, and otherwise preparing them, cooking the entire meal, cleaning up, and spiting out the meal on serving dishes. :-)
It should be able to cook good tasting homemade meals from real ingredients (even fresh from the garden if you have a garden), not just plastic wrapped junk food. You load food items through hopper or door in one side, then a manipulator arm picks them up, reads or otherwise identifies what they are, and stores them in the inbuilt pantry or refrigerator.
It should keep an inventory of the refrigerator and panty and be able to suggest recipes that use what you have on hand while optimizing for cost, nutrition, and minimizing wasted food from spoilage. It should be able to produce shopping lists for you based on foods you use frequently or recipes you want to cook in the future. (It could even auto order foods and have them delivered, although I like the idea of just getting a shopping list and buying it myself better.)
It should be able to help you avoid wasting leftover foods by reaccepting leftovers, storing them, displaying the leftovers as a suggestion for the next meals so you don't forget, and know the optimal way to reheat or re-prepare them.
It should be controlled through an app on your phone, over the local network, and definitely not dependent on some cloud service. You should be able to still get a nice hot supper if the Internet goes down.
The app should show you a list of recipes that can be made with the ingredients on hand, you pick one or a couple, it tells you how long it's going to take to prepare. You tap go, and 45min later you have a perfect homecooked supper!
Maybe so.. but technology wise I don't think there's anything here that doesn't exist yet or that is even exceptionally advanced. It's just a matter of putting it all together and writing the code.
I'm skeptical--this market would be so incredibly huge that I cannot fathom everyone overlooking it.
Literally everyone would get this. It would make the world so much healthier--enable everyone to easily diet, let people subscribe to healthy meal plans, etc.
It would pay for itself even at astronomical prices, via health benefits, no need to go out for dinner, and reduced food prices via making things from scratch.
Buying in bulk would be more common and much easier. So much comes from grain, sugar, salt and yeast. Much less food would be wasted--no need to batch cook anything and ignore the leftovers. The robot would be baking your bread, making donuts and croissants, tortillas, tortilla chips, mayonnaise, yogurt, sauerkraut, pickles. Things we never consider making on our own, that are generally considered the base components to make other things. I think it could easily offset $300-$1k in monthly expenses for just about everyone.
My assumptions are that it can be tailored to follow a recipe, of which many widely-published recipes are created/curated by chefs and experts, and once that is done the robot rarely, if ever, fails to produce the very best version of the dish.
If the only hindrance is just sitting down and writing the code, someone ought to get busy, because this is about as impactful of a development for the planet as any could be.
I feel like an iPhone of robotics is pretty irrelevant at the moment.
We can't even build a single-chore robot at the moment that replaces a human.
The software side of "chore-robots" is totally beyond anything that currently exists.
Think about the basic task of washing/folding/putting away clothes.
The AI would need
* Full 3D spatial navigation
* Be able to identify what is clothing
* Be able to reliably pick up clothing
* Be able to open doors to get around the house
* Somehow know how to operate every model of washer/dryer, including different possible placements of the machines
* Somehow know how to fold any clothing item
* Somehow know where to put the folded clothes (be able to open any kind of dresser?)
If you wanted to solve this you'd probably start with things like "well maybe there's a designated clothes bin that comes with the product that the robot understands" or "well maybe we make the user mark out exactly the space where they want the clothes placed"
But then you're leaving general AI territory at that point and heading back in regular robotics territory where the solution is to put the problem "on rails" as much as possible.
Yeah but could you sell a solution which requires a special washer, dryer, and clothes storage system? It's still not an easy problem, but you can try to reduce the complexity.
The "markets" where robotics could have orders of magnitude effects are what I call field to factory. The most obvious item is construction. A pre-fabricated house is cheaper and waaaay faster to build because the factory has robots and assembly lines etc to help. But even on-site construction can be assisted - that is turning the field into a temporary factory.
My sneaking suspicion is that just as we call any AI that works ML because while it does a specific job, we expect it to think like us instead of bringing what it is.
And for robotics we will have many amazing advances and social changes, but we will expect it to move like us so won't call it robotics.
This also leads to a second problem I think adoption will hit - robots will find an uncanny valley and it is easier and simpler to just build something that is in no way organic-like just to avoid human "yuck" factor. I can imagine some giant spider like contraption that washes up really well, and simply never selling because it looks like a giant freaking spider.
to me the killer robot is either the dishwasher or the washing machine.
however thats not very forward looking of me.
We don't really need SCADA manipulators for clothes folding, we need a machine that we can just dump our washing in. Inside they might have a 6 axis arm, but I doubt it. There are machines that kinda do that for industrial linen companies. However they are huge and expensive, and you still need to feed in the clothes one by one.
Now what a decent robot arm could be used for is augmenting VR. Being able to tug, push, block and parry a person who's playing a sword game would be brilliant fun. Not without safety headaches, but fun.
I do agree that a decent arm thats cheap and powerful would unlock innovation. But they sorta do exist now. However we really need a usable IK library that doesn't require a maths degree to setup. We also need a library that would allow easy planning of moves as well. Its possible today, but hard.
Think trying to fetch and parse a JSON file over HTTP on a first generation arduino. Thats where we are with the libraries to make Robot arms usable.
> New revenue streams: app-store fees, data-mining, new advertisement channels.
Please no! Granting corporations control over your home physical environment is a dystopian scenario. Home hardware should be simple and reliable. The market has killed Juicero, and I hope that any company, that tries to pull this off, follows their way.
Recently, globally, there have been a staggering number of generally half-baked ROS-driven startups attempting to sell investors on the future of industrial robot arms making food. A closely allied, next-wave group are those selling commercial kitchens on the future of industrial conveyor belts preparing pizzas.
The article suggests that the successful business model of such robot would be to provide hardware and open it to third-party apps. This is exactly what Pine64 is doing with their laptops, smartphones and other devices, and it seems to work fine. No software is required at all, everything is done by volunteers with FLOSS!
It seems to kinda work for them, but none of their products is the next iPhone for a reason: Nobody can massively profit from them in ways that would allow for make much larger investments
I really liked the vision of “Sally” where if we made AI smart enough to drive a vehicle, it would not be humane to turn it off without consent and they got retired, though a repurposing/recombination ala “the Culture” would be less wasteful.
I think the killer app - and something I would pay for immediately - is a moveable platform programmed to travel between waypoints.
So, a platform that stays level regardless of terrain and you put stuff on it and tell it to go to the (living room, backyard, carport, barn, whatever).
I arrive home with a load of groceries and I put four bags on this platform and press the "kitchen" button.
That's it. Just a magic box that transports (slowly) things to places around your yard/property/warehouse.