> very very hard to make a business case for humanoid or quadrupedal robots that is not better solved by more standard automation systems
It's a general robot vs a specialized one. The only reason why it's a hard business case is usefulness vs price.
Why do you have a washing machine that sits there doing nothing 95% of the day? You literally dedicate usable space to this.
Obviously, the dream is iRobot (not the 2nd gen) and possibly like Startrek where working is optional and purely a pursuit of a dream instead of a necessity of living in the modern world.
> It's a general robot vs a specialized one. The only reason why it's a hard business case is usefulness vs price.
Yes. And as it is a common issue, we’ve seen it play out again and again: specialized wins for an incredibly long time, until the technology and production power leaps forward, and the generic solution becomes enough of a commodity to warrant using it in sub-par use cases.
I see the Raspberry Pi as the poster child of this: using a generic computing device to activate your garage door only makes sense because it’s so cheap to do so (at least while supply lasted)
I’d imagine humanoid robots will follow the same path: decades from now, as the cost to build one has ridiculously plummeted and we’ve already moved on to way more efficient solutions in specialized applications, we’ll have home humanoids tasked to do dumb things, because it will just be that cheap anyway.
I mean the thing with the raspberry pi in your example is there is even cheaper microcontrollers that are just about as easy to develop for as the raspberry pi. The ESP’s of the world are almost an order of magnitude cheaper and are specifically designed for such scenarios.
However those ESP chips ate the lunch of a whole line of other more specialized microcontrollers. So your argument still stands.
> The only reason why it's a hard business case is usefulness vs price.
This sums it up for me. If I could replace my dishwasher, washing machine, dryer with something that can do those things at an equivalent price/reliability then sure.
But a general robot requires far greater capability than any individual device and hence that is a hard ask.
But maybe you could lessen the general requirements by leveraging the specific machines.
IE if you can get it to use the washing machine, use the dryer, fold clothes and put them away (even if the wardrobe has to be a particular style/shape/format) - then "whole problem of washing clothes" would be solved.
And that would be popular.
I'd renovate large chunks of a house if I never have to "do laundry" again.
If we really needed that, all our homes would be already equipped with a system that move our dirty clothes to an external storage for a laundry service to pickup and a system that would pick up cleaned up and ironed clothes and would automatically store them in the correct wardrobe based on a tag system on the clothing. An automatic system similar to what manage big warehouses. It wouldn't be that complicated provided the house is build with that in mind and it could surely be retrofited to older houses by making holes in a few walls. It would be much more efficient than a mobile home robot.
The reason we don't do that is we are control freaks.
> The reason we don't do that is we are control freaks.
To be practical your service would need to pick up laundry at all hours of the day and be basically “on demand”.
Cats puke on your only comforter. Kids spilled something on your fancy jeans. You need towels, stat.
That being said, if the service did enough (say put the clothes away organized and folded and had a turnaround time of a few hours) people would probably find ways to work around the shortcomings of using a laundry service.
It's a general robot vs a specialized one. The only reason why it's a hard business case is usefulness vs price.
Why do you have a washing machine that sits there doing nothing 95% of the day? You literally dedicate usable space to this.
Obviously, the dream is iRobot (not the 2nd gen) and possibly like Startrek where working is optional and purely a pursuit of a dream instead of a necessity of living in the modern world.