- interact with buttons or touch screens (so laundry might be hard)
The one use case I think it might be worth it is if the robot can take a room full of toys and return everything back to where it belongs. Kind of like a one click, reset this room. If it can help me keep organized and clean around the house that would be a big win. Also, if it can help me detect which clothes are still wearable and which I should probably wash, that'd be nice.
I'd gladly pay 5k for a robot that can auto-organize my stuff around the house, even if it involves a lot of customization and setup. Imagine leaving your groceries next to the fridge and coming back to a perfectly organized fridge. Or letting your kids play in the play room and then the robot comes in and puts all the toys back. Or if you just tend to leave stuff out (throw your clothes on the floor or forget to return stuff), the robot can put it back.
> I'd gladly pay 5k for a robot that can auto-organize my stuff around the house
The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares?
A good weekly cleaner (4 hours) is about €22/h in Paris, or €4.5k/year.
Let’s say your robot lives 4 years, similar to your computer (which seems fair, since it is one, and an abused one at that). Since you amortize its price over 4 years, its initial cost must be below €18.3k ($21k) with human-quality-parity.
Personally, though, I would bet on dedicated, single-purpose robots, working together through wireless communication. Simpler to build, less costly, easier to replace. One small wheeled quadcopter for cleaning surfaces, one wheeled laundry box to carry it to the washing machine, one arm attached to the washing machine to put it in, etc.
I can tell you there is a huge market for something that works well in the 40-50k range. You are vastly, vastly underestimating this market.
Hotels have a variety of tasks they would love to replace a host of low cost labor with robots with.
Someone in a higher income bracket wouldn’t think twice about that cost if it did significant work. On the other hand, the bar is high (cleaning, folding, picking up -- all are still fairly challenging AI problems, to say nothing of the "business" logic that would go into it).
Then you've got that quality servos are expensive. Some of that can resolved with volume, but not all of it.
And they are consistent. Make it work in the few distinct layout configurations and specific hotel appliances, and then it can repeat on all the rooms.
Your statement and previous do not contradict. Multiplying the hours required to do the job in a larger environment like a hotel (4/week becomes 80 person hours / week) would produce a break-even cost higher than what you suggest.
Indeed. To give further figures, in France the minimum wage is around €10, and employees cannot work more than 35h/week, which yields a price point of €72k below which a 4-year-lifetime machine with human performance becomes cost-effective for a hotel.
In fact, France would probably be a very attractive country for this technology because of this.
Well, what did happen to them? The implication of your statement was that they were obviously totally fine, but is that a given? It's possible they were miserable and then died. Switching careers is not always easy and smooth.
I'm all for transition assistance and a safety net to mitigate the harms, but halting human ingenuity seems like it would put far greater numbers of people at risk of misery and untimely deaths.
Lamplighters are especially useful to consider here.
How many lives has electricity saved? How many ICUs can operate continual machines because of it? How many people at risk of heat stroke can run AC in summer because of it? How many transplants and temperature controlled medicines got delivered because of it? What about its role in food safety? What about timely communications of life saving information, like those lost at sea asking for help, or severe weather alerts advising others to shelter? That's just the beginning, it seems incalculable really.
That lamplighter should have had a society willing to catch them during the transition. But imagine if it solved this problem by holding that one person's job sacred at the cost of millions of other lives instead.
It's absolutely good and relevant to worry about individual cases, but it seems like society is better off if we allow jobs to adjust to the actual current needs of humanity, rather than holding them fixed. Then we just also try to do our best to take care of as many of those who fall through the cracks as we can.
I mean this is absolutely true in the sense that 99.9% of the hours that humans used to spend doing things across history have already been automated away.
The amount of time we used to spend making a single yard of cloth, or creating 10 pounds of flour is almost unfathomable today.
The prevailing economic theory was that we would automate away so much work that leisure time would prevail. Instead our massive increases in output have just driven greater consumption.
But the difference made by housecleaning robots isn’t the straw the breaks the camels back.
It would take a massive breakthrough in AI to eliminate the majority of knowledge workers at the scale that agriculture and textiles have already been transformed.
The killer app here is tele-operated cleaning, with a monthly subscription model.
I actually dont think it will replace your aforementioned 4h/week cleaner, just augment it with daily tasks.
Trying to stay as ethics neutral here.
We will probably see something like "Human assisted AI" with a sliding scale from mostly human to mostly AI for various tasks at various stages of development.
The operators will be sourced where work is cheap, like Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Once VC gets it they'll fund the first few generations of bots on optimism alone.
Honestly who cares if it cant do everything.
Nor can robotic vacuum cleaners and I have three.
@spykie
So what if it cant go up stairs, have robots on each level.
If it cant pick its self up, have multiple, let them help.
Most things it cleans are light, so no problem there either.
Cant interact buttons? Give it a rotating toolhead.
@bArray
it doesn't need to operate autonomously, see the Human assisted AI argument.
With good UX one remote operator will control five or six bots at once, tagging objects, issuing instructions.
Give the User a good AR app, let them issue location based instruction around the house that the "AI" (remote operator) will slowly handle during the day.
Honestly, this space will be a primary design driver soon.
I cant totally see IKEA making robot compatible cupboards.
If this space isn't huge I will be incredibly surprised.
Sometimes I read things on HN and wonder if I'm living in some alternate universe by myself. I would never in a million years, allow someone else to remote-operate a robot in my house. The idea of even allowing something above Roomba-level intelligence in my living area is a no-go.
> Sometimes I read things on HN and wonder if I'm living in some alternate universe by myself. I would never in a million years, allow someone else to remote-operate a robot in my house. The idea of even allowing something above Roomba-level intelligence in my living area is a no-go.
Mmm...I guess it's fair to assume that the IQ of a human cleaner is superior to anything resembling a Roomba. Would you hire a human cleaner and grant them access to your living area? And if so would you be monitoring their every move while they go about the job?
Yeah I agree, I think this space is huge. Imagine two or three generations down, someone from a poorer country using some form of VR tool with this, maybe with two arms instead of one, navigating your airbnb rental, cleaning counter tops, doing laundry, and organizing your stuff, and then jumping to the next appointment and doing it over and over for a solid days wage for their respective economy. With someone manning the bot, I see this being far more flexible than just your robot vaccum. They might not be able to do as many things as well as an in-person maid, but for 80% of tasks they might be able to do it good enough.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that sentiment could be used to describe between 80 and 95% of the global job market. Most jobs suck, otherwise you wouldn't have to pay people to do them.
Another possible angle is integrations, i.e. robot-friendly appliances. Maybe the washing machine has a powered door and an API that the robot (or some other software) uses to control it. No need to push buttons. Obviously, this won't cover all scenarios, but as someone upthread said, to be useful it doesn't have to do everything.
The bigger issue, IMO, is avoiding distasters like Roombas trying to vacuum dog poop.
If I’ve learned anything in this industry, it’s that integrations cannot make your product viable. They’re nice, but are more often than not hail Mary’s because the actual product isn’t viable.
Yeah, it might be hard to sell a robot that can do a, b, and c as long as you already have set of devices that meet it halfway. OTOH, if it can do a sufficient set of useful things to get some traction, then you might start to see some integrations.
The thing about examples like the washing machine is, I haven't looked but I would be surprised if there isn't already a networked washing machine, less the powered door, that is meant for smart homes.
Two months ago, my partner vacuumed up fox poop. No idea why he thought it was a good idea. We realised it wasn't when the soft, sticky debris coated the inside of the vacuum cleaner's flexible hose. :(
The smell only improved after I cleaned every internal crevice. Including submerging the crinkly part of the hose in a half-full bath and pulling through a sponge three or four times.
We still have to put deodorant beads inside the vacuum cleaner bag.
Difference is : robots take up a lot more space. Having multiple simple robots leads to traffic in the real world and taking away space that humans could use. If robots could be like bosons that would be better
I'm not actually sure that's a difference. On the old systems where that philosophy was developed, disk space was at a premium. In fact, IIRC, the lack of space precipitated the need for a modular system of the sort described by the Unix philosophy.
For a hundred robots, sure. For inner city apartments, sure. But I could put 10 of these things in the corner of this room right now and mostly not notice.
I use a good weekly cleaner, and she does not organize my stuff. If anything, hiring her has forced me to organize more frequently so my stuff is not in her way when she comes to clean.
It's a totally different use case to have a labor-saving device available 24/7. For example, I did not stop using my dishwasher when I hired a cleaner, and my cleaner does not do my dishes or put them away.
My dream house includes a kitchen with enough dishwashers that they function as the cupboards for the dishes as well. then when the dishes are down they're already away.
Just replace your shelves with a couple of desktop dishwashers. The water use isn't great but soap and food waste isn't a heavy chemical. The obstacles to home ownership are problematic, however.
a human cleaner isn't really a perfect substitute for a robot. people might feel uncomfortable with having a human worker in their house for a variety of reasons. most people I know actually clean their whole house before the cleaning service shows up. you don't have to feel guilt/embarrassment at the state of your house when the robot starts working. I could imagine a lot of people might be willing to pay a premium for this, even if the robot doesn't do as good of a job.
There's something darkly funny about people so embarrassed to have a cleaning person in their house, that they create a solution that would put most cleaning people out of a job.
The knowledge workers automate jobs away, leading pundits to say the future for low-skilled workers is to provide boutique services for the upper class. The end being that the upper class is too ashamed to actually consume those services if it means looking at a person...well, that's sort of a delicious irony, isn't it?
I have never hired a cleaner, but I imagine there are also people who are uncomfortable having strangers in their house and handling their things.
I have also heard about people getting cleaners who initially do a good job, but whose work quality degrades over time. You wouldn't have that problem with a robot.
Not to brag, but my house has a a machine (and a room!) dedicated to cleaning a very embarrassing thing. I'll go even further and brag that I use this room and machine daily! Western society has normalized using the toilet, thankfully, and for a long time now, but it wasn't always the norm.
there's definitely some irony to it. I do think a significant motivation for automating stuff is to avoid firsthand confrontation with the reality of capitalism. some people don't necessarily feel uncomfortable with the power dynamic though; they're just embarrassed that another human sees how unclean their living space is. someone might also worry about theft, or they might not like having to be in their house at a certain time each week to let the workers in. it can also just feel like a general loss of privacy in your home.
or in a more Black Mirror-esque reality, maybe after the human dies the robot no longer detects a heart rate or pulse and considers the corpse as trash and just disposes of it automatically.
At our house, we don't clean because of embarrassment. We clean because we want them to do the stuff that we don't want to do ourselves. I'd rather they spend time cleaning the oven than pick up toys.
Well you can not have those if you don't like eavesdropping. A cleaning lady is atleast something you notice might hear you and she wont use the data to decide my credit rating.
A safe assumtion is that all IoT devices spy on you. I wonder how much longer there actually are robot vacuum cleaners that are safely offline for sale with full functionality.
That’s obviously not just about cost. Human beings have schedules and lives of their own. They must eat, drink, shit, fuck, and watch Netflix. I cannot keep a human being in my closet to serve me anytime I want. I’d be willing to pay a premium for a mindless servant that’s available nearly 100% of time.
move to Singapore then. they have full-time, live-in maids from indonesia or phillipines that can cost as low as USD 300-400 a month. i grew up in Singapore, where I had 3 maids on staff at all times, and they took care of everything, 24/7.
not sure if this comes across as dehumanizing, but trust me, the employers don't give a shit if the maids judge them. i don't know of anyone who has ever worried about being judged by their maids.
I am not defending the situation except to point out .. people at the lowest rung of the social ladder need to eat and have work with dignity. This is a complex issue. I'm glad I don't live in a developing country anymore so don't have to come face to face with it. I would like to raise awareness that you , I and a bulk of people on HN live in absolute abundance compared to a wide swath of the population in places such as Philippines, Indonesia, India and Pakistan. It is better not to judge others like the original poster (who may be providing people with dignified labor opportunities).
If Alice hires a full-time live in maid and her just-as-wealthy neighbor Bob buys a robot instead, all else equal, which is having a better impact on the world?
- The robot is in your house the whole 168 hours a week, not just 4. You're assuming a good cleaning robot would be absolutely useless for anything else, like cooking, laundry, etc.
- 4-year robot lifetime is overly pessimistic. If upgrade is not the reason (which has nothing to do with lifetime, it's your choice to upgrade), a robot could last way more than 4-years (especially with right-to-repair laws in place).
- That said, such a robot will most likely be available for less than $21k and very soon in the near future.
The first point has an obvious response and the last is speculative.
I find interesting to address the middle one statistically.
A given machine has a number of random events that can kill it. Each possible event type i can be modeled as a Poisson process Xᵢ with, in a given year, probability λᵢ. The machine survives in a given year if no occurrence of event i happens, with probability Pr(Xᵢ = 0) = exp(-λᵢ).
For instance, a device with an average lifetime of 8 years and a single possible cause of death, has λ = -ln(½^⅛) = 0.087.
Given N independent event types (say, if you have on the order of N components), the yearly survival of the overall machine has probability Πᷡᵢ exp(-λᵢ).
Thus the lifetime of the overall machine is ln(½)÷ln(½^(Σᷡᵢ 1÷Lᵢ)) = 1 ÷ Σᷡᵢ (1÷Lᵢ)
if each component has lifetime Lᵢ.
For instance, two components with an average lifetime of 8 years yield a single machine with an average lifetime of 4 years.
The more death-causing event types there are, the smaller the lifetime; and a general-purpose robot inherently has more.
I believe this result is counter-intuitive, and is the reason you might be led to think I am overly pessimistic.
Engineers take this phenomenon into consideration and design systems with redundancy and/or easily replaceable parts. You need specific numbers for the design in order to treat this mathematically.
> ... machine ... has ... events that can kill it ...
> ... N independent event types ...
So if the robot blows a $0.03 (i.e., 3 cents) electrolytic cap [0], that's an independent event type that "killed" the machine? Just trying to get a sense of how you define "machine kill" (and as I said I mentioned a big caveat of right-to-repair laws).
It shows that cars can never reach the pricepoint of a bike for the same lifetime, because the increased number of failure points require an increased level of quality of each part to yield the same lifetime.
stuff goes wrong with cars all the time. most of it isn't critical to the core function of the machine. cars also undergo routine maintenance where parts are (hopefully) replaced before they fail entirely.
I think you have to think beyond equivalencies. We pay for 4 hrs/week because we can't afford more. But what if you could have 15 times or 50 times a day kind of cleaning, just not as thorough?
That's what I think the value is for this robot. A quick clean, reorg of the room / house.
One could make the argument that you normally want exposure to germs to keep your immune system strong. There’s even some conjecture that exposure to cold corona viruses offers some protection from COVID.
Or If we get a universal income, the cost of personal cleaners goes way up, and it suddenly makes way more financial sense to automate such routine jobs...
> The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares?
This is where raising the minimum wage can spur innovation. If we gradually increase the cost of human labour (with higher wages, and other conditions), then the market will be motivated to fund & find technological solutions.
Or you could teach your kids to clean up their toys themselves. Make it a fun game for example.
Set an example by putting away your own groceries as soon as you put them in the kitchen. Boom 5k saved.
Maybe they will grow up to not be the type of person who leaves all of their crap on the table of the university table after they are done studying.
To be clear: I am not shifting on you as a parent. I am making fun of owning robots to do the specific things you mentioned. Obviously if you are immobile in some sense it would be great to have a cleaning robot
People used to say the same things about dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, powered lawn mowers, etc. Heck, one could imagine Og the caveperson lamenting that their kids don’t know how to drag stones properly anymore given that new fangled wheel invention. Don’t worry, we will find other ways to discipline and train our kids as tech marches forward.
The important part is that people know how to do the things - and that the things have to be done - without the equipment. I grew up with a dishwasher, but when I moved out I was without for five years. I didn't end up panicking and just did the manual washing up for five years.
I own a house now with a dishwasher; I don't NEED it, but it sure is convenient.
Anyway, when it comes to kids picking up their shit, the important part there is that they learn the importance of not living in a fucking tip. If they or a robot or the well-paid help does it, it doesn't really matter in the end as long as it gets done.
Anybody can learn how to do housework when and if they need it. Doing it as a child can instill a work ethic which is very useful, but there's no need to train them on how to do it.
You'd be surprised how many young adults are not aware of basic things like if your sink does not have a garbage disposal you should not dump large chunks of food down the drain, or that you should replace your dish sponge periodically. Certainly these are things that could be easily learned, but I do think there is a lack of awareness (or caring) about basic procedures on which cleaning products to use when, etc.
I have seen recent college grads go over a year without washing/changing their bed sheets. In one case I found a couple dead bugs under the sheets. It may be pure laziness but in that case they are also feigning ignorance.
It's similar to how we don't teach kids basic accounting or personal finance in high school and they graduate and find themselves in mountains of high interest cc debit and making bad financial decisions after another, because they can learn it on their own when they're adults.
Your point is valid, but I never pass up an opportunity for a fun fact, so: wheels are not nearly as old as you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel
Part of any organism's objective is to do more with less. Being efficient is a predictor of success in nature. Being efficient provides you and your family with health and security.
Obviously this evolutionary bias has gone a little off the rails with humans and we now have health and psychological problems as a result of efficiencies. I guess that's where self governance kicks in, unlike other organisms we can reason and adapt in spite of our fundamental evolutionary programming. Whether or not this evolutionary experiment works out is still yet to be determined.
> People used to say the same things about dishwashers
I still say the same about dishwashers. In the time it takes me to sort things into what can and cannot safely go in the washer, scrape off the food residue, load the machine, and unload the machine, I can simply wash the dishes and stack them on a rack to dry.
Vacuum cleaners are useful but actually not very important in the kind of dwelling that the robot could inhabit because it will have to have flat floor with no carpets so a broom will do just as well (or a Roomba type cleaner).
Dishwashers have a quality effect like many things.
If you have an ineffective dishwasher, you have to do lots of prep before putting dishes in, exclude lots of things from getting washed, etc. That takes longer, plus you don't cycle it as often, so you might find that you need a dirty dish and need to wash it by hand.
A very effective dishwasher is one for which you don't need to prep the dishes (just put them in) and can handle most of what you need to wash. It takes less work to use, and cycles more frequently. You can also cycle more frequently by getting a smaller machine.
The opportunity to invest in effective appliances is one reason it's nice to own a home, as opposed to renting.
You can get effective appliances by renting more expensive units too. That was one of the requirements when my SO and I were looking for a new place. Big sink, nice appliances, etc. We're paying about double what we were at our old apartment, but the convenience is well worth it while we're still focusing on paying off school debt but we also want somewhere nice to live.
Especially in the age of COVID-19 in the US, I can't imagine what it would be like to live in a super cheap crappy apartment like we were before.
Bonus, we also spend a lot less on electricity! We moved into a new-ish apartment building and I can keep the AC on 70 in Texas and my bill is less than $40/mo. In my old apartment, I would keep it at 76 during the day and only move it to 72 right before bed to save money. Bills were regularly $100+. Modern construction has so much energy savings built in to code now that you could potentially save money by moving to a more expensive apartment in a new building.
If you actually had a simple hack that reliably made children clean up after themselves, and could somehow sell it for money without it being instantly pirated, you would make rather more billions of dollars than Aaron Edsinger's robot ever would.
There is no magic trick there, just stop being afraid of hurting their feelings by being assertive and making your expectations of their contribution to the household known.
> Or you could teach your kids to clean up their toys themselves. [...] To be clear: I am not shifting on you as a parent. I am making fun of owning robots to do the specific things you mentioned.
Most of the specific things they mentioned have nothing to do with being a parent, and also apply to people who do not have children.
Instead of building robots, perhaps we should allow low cost care workers to help immobile people. These care workers can be sourced locally or abroad (immigrants). Boom. You've just lifted someone out of poverty and helped an immobile human get a live human care taker.
Why the focus on low cost and immigrants? There's millions of people in your country (and I don't even know where you live) that live below the poverty line or are unemployed.
Open up jobs, pay a decent wage, and stop this line of thought about exploiting people as much as possible for as little money as possible.
Why are you equating low cost with exploitation? Why focus on the immigrants when my post _clearly_ mentioned local or immigrants? It is also very disingenuous for you to remark about my location. Clearly, Hacker News is US/Silicon Valley centric. My comment was pointing out that Silicon Valley engineers need to get their heads out of their asses and look at the unemployment not only in the US but rest of the world.
Caregiving is a great job for those who don't have a job. More importantly, SV seems to be forgetting the human component of care giving. A robot _cannot_ possibly take the place of an actual human. It's just not the same.
- operate in your particular setting (it's likely over-trained for that specific environment)
- run for long periods of time as a fully autonomous robot
- be anywhere near small humans or animals
- do any of the tasks in the video with any kind of speed or precision
- learn new tasks
- handle multiple objectives, or even process the request of a single objective reliably
This is nowhere near being consumer grade. It'll either ship half-baked or you'll have to get on the "it's just around the corner" train, along with the autonomous vehicle guys.
You're right about this expanded list of things it can't do. However, the conclusion is a bit on the negative side. The Roomba or any of the autonomous grass mowing robots can't do any of the things you mention either, and yet they are commercially successful in the consumer world. The article mentions that this robot is still a research platform, so as you say, it is not currently ready for consumers. However, there is a lot of potential here despite of the limitations.
It was to highlight that this really isn't the "do everything" robot that it's being advertised as that some are assuming it will be.
> The Roomba or any of the autonomous grass mowing robots
> can't do any of the things you mention either, and yet
> they are commercially successful in the consumer world.
No, but they are significantly cheaper single purpose robots that do their intended tasks well. This is aiming to be a more generic robot that does everything badly, at a much higher cost.
> there is a lot of potential here despite of the
> limitations
Well, the problem for researchers beforehand wasn't a lack of nice robot platforms to use. Some robotic arm controlled by a laptop on some wheels will already get you quite a lot of this functionality.
Really what a lot of researchers want is a nice framework that already offers a bunch of functionality they don't want to program themselves, so they can work on the more exciting cutting edge stuff. It needs to be robust enough to allow them to hack on random research hardware.
The Pepper robot falls slightly short on this for example, as many places have purchased one hoping it could be a robotic PoS/mobile FAQ - in reality it was just a mostly buggy experience for consumers.
I had a look at the code, it seems to run ROS, offer some possibilities, but I couldn't see at a quick glance some high level functionality they could hack on top of (although I could have missed it).
The more single purpose the device, the lower the price point would need to be. The Roomba also is a smaller device, so you’re not compromising living space either.
> Since when do we define the value of something by the
> infinite list of things it can't do?
When that infinite list is things people want. I speaking of course from the "consumer" perspective and outlining some reasons why this robot is many, many years away from being ready for that market. This particular robot will likely never be anything other than a research platform that has all support dropped for it after a few years.
> I could make a list a mile long of all the things my
> dishwasher cannot do... does that mean no HNs have
> dishwashers?
Your dishwasher is not an autonomous robot, arguably it's not even a robot. It does one very specific task mostly well. This robot is marketed as some generic home automation machine, which it isn't.
The point I'm making is, this robot is being sold on the idea of some magical do-all machine around your house, when the reality is far different.
The problems I stated are really some of (but not all) the key problems that need to be solved in order for it to do as the advertising suggests. To put the problem into perspective, with billions of dollars man could send people to the moon, but is still unable to solve some of these fundamental robotics problems with similar funding.
I agree though, if this is ever to be a consumer product then it needs a massive reduction in scope and price drop (depending on what problem it solves). It's hard to think of a problem that is as commonly shared and simplistic in scope as hoovering without being a gimmick though.
You've got cooking which is basically automated through meal prep (e.g. microwave meals or even fast food services). You've got cleaning clothes - but the scope is enormous. Dusting and putting small items back in their correct location may be the only real possibility.
I'm very skeptical of fully autonomous vehicles in the short term but I'm more optimistic for this robot. The big issues for autonomous vehicles are mainly:
- You have to deal with and anticipate the behavior of dozens of other people/animals/machines.
- If you mess up you can injure or kill people.
This robot doesn't really have either of these issues. You'd have to be careful around babies and very small animals, that's true, but there's still a huge potential market even if you remove small pet owners and parents of toddlers.
Beyond that training the machine to identify common household items and tell it where to put them (the remote goes there, the backpack goes there, the shoes go there etc...) doesn't seem too far fetched. Being able to do the laundry (minus any ironing and assuming that you have a drying machine) also seems feasible to me. It won't be able to learn new tasks but if it's successful enough the company making them could continuously update it to implement new features, similar to how smartphone voice assistants keep improving and becoming smarter as engineers handle more corner cases.
Now are these features worth the current price tag, or even half of it? Absolutely not IMO, but that's obviously only for rich early adopters at the moment. If it gains enough traction I'm sure it can improve a lot and fast while cutting the price.
Yes, this is the point. The market is replacing housework, but with its capabilities it can only replace a specific subset of housework currently. However, if there is just one really valuable thing it can do, then it may be worth it even if there are 50 things it can't do.
- Gather & sort laundry, maybe even put in the washing machine
- Gather dishes and maybe put them in the washer
All chores easy for an able bodies human. But imagine having some disability or getting older. Getting back that autonomy in your life is definitely worth the money.
Heck, if I have to pick between playing with my newborn son or doing the above and the likes, I'd trade my car for a robot that can do this.
I would hesitate to use this robot for dishes. Maybe sorting laundry but not folding them. And I don't know if it can actually set the table fast enough.
You'd be surprised at how much dexterity and precision all these things need. I doubt this robot can handle that.
I'd imagine getting a robot to do laundry from start to finish in the way my housekeeper does effectively impossible. I'm not au fait with how the complexity of automated tasks is estimated ala algorithmic complexity, but I imagine is pretty much beyond impossible. Especially given living space constraints in most homes
If you have the money, why not just hire a help? Hire your neighbour, not some billionaire. There's social ways and means for a situation like that.
But oh no, having people around and paying them a decent wage smells like socialism! Anti-individualism! Better to pay 20K for a half-assed robot that can only do a fraction of what needs to be done than to pay someone's wage, right?
Call your neighbor every time you need to put some dishes in the dishwasher or do some laundry?
You could have a maid but then you need to have them around all the time or you need a lot of space. Also many places in Europe it's essentially illegal to have a maid.
How is it illegal to have a maid in EU? Never heard of this one so genuinely curious. It's super expensive for sure but not illegal at least here in France.
Maybe this is mostly in Northern Europe. There's certainly companies providing cleaning services, but you may find thats it's essentially impossible to find locals who will clean and cook for you every night. The alternative is then an au pair, but they're allowed to do only limited housework and some people have even gone to jail for having multiple au pairs working as maids, tough technically for breaking immigration laws by having multiple au pairs, it's judged harshly because a lot of people believe the concept of maids is nothing but oppression of poor women.
I said essentialy. There's certainly companies providing cleaning services, but you may find thats it's essentially impossible to find locals who will clean and cook for you every night. The alternative is then an au pair, but they're allowed to do only limited housework and some people have even gone to jail for having multiple au pairs working as maids, tough technically mostly for breaking immigration laws for having more than one au pair.
I think at this point, if there was a robot capable of doing this, it would also drive my kid to school,walk the dog,and even do the dishes on its spare time. Instead we get a tall clothe hanger on a motorised base.
This seems a bit harsh. What about an elderly/ill/disabled person, who would love the companionship and would make for a kind and responsible owner, except that they aren't capable of consistently giving the dog sufficient exercise?
I certainly can't imagine trusting a robot with a dog any time soon. Maybe there's a semi-autonomous, supervised use case, e.g. human takes dog & robot to a park; robot walks laps with the dog, staying close enough for the human to see what's going on and intervene if necessary. The set of people that would help (i.e. for whom it would be both needed and feasible) might be pretty small, though.
Wouldn't you pay for a robot what you would pay for a car if it can help you do your regular housekeeping? A $15k car arguably provides less value if you mostly use it to ferry you from home to work and back.
Over here, in Eastern Europe i have no need for a car(i sold it this year, after 10 years).
Public transport is really decent if you use it outside of rush hours, most stores are in walking distance(not only form my location but all over the city). And there is a great network of cycle lanes so you can easily cycle to work.
Plus our cities are usually wide, but not tall, which means more places for developers to build houses.
> Or letting your kids play in the play room and then the robot comes in and puts all the toys back.
That's the kids responsibility after they are done. Otherwise I do like the application to keep things tidy. It's a small thing but it improves quality of life and removes a common task of dealing with clutter. I think a lot of robots will start with huge limitations that nearly paint it into a corner. Eventually a more generalized platform will exist. Too many companies are attempting to make that today and skip the necessary steps in between.
It's hard for robots to compete with below minimum wage illegal immigrant labor. I pay $100 for two people to spend 4 hours cleaning a 3000 square foot home - including laundry.
By not being the sole income earner. If their partner works a comparable job, suddenly youre looking at $25/hr which is perfectly comfortable in most areas.
When I saw the video I was mainly thinking about all the things it might be able to help my elderly grandmother with.
I mean I get that luxury and convenience of this robot taking care of stuff that you find boring or tedious, but imagine this robot being able to do certain normal every-day stuff that you're actually no longer able to do yourself? (Or maybe you're capable but it hurts to do, you get the idea)
A few years ago I had my leg in a cast, and I'm just thinking if this robot could've helped me put on my sock?
I picture these being used around hospitals and nursing homes for general fetching and returning of things. i.e. linens, telephones, keeping patient's belongings in their own room (this was a nightmare for my grandma in the alzheimer's ward) and other things that would allow nurses and porters to be more effective
It will still be a base. Awesome thing about legs is they can step way out of the equilibrium point thus creating a huge leverage for e.g. pulling or holding heavy things.
There's a few videos on youtube of various mechanisms for getting up stairs without walking on legs. I suppose the challenge is to get it to work properly on the huge variety of different stairs found out in the real world though.
Lots of washing machines and other household equipment now has APIs, so interacting with buttons or touch screens might not be necessary.
> The one use case I think it might be worth it is if the robot can take a room full of toys and return everything back to where it belongs.
I think the 6x label on the dusting Spiderman scene is where I lost any interest. If it's that slow then it would take weeks to pickup the pile of Legos sitting on my floor right now, assuming it could.
Kid's chores 2020: Up until 3AM programming the robot to take out the trash. Purchased the robot two weeks ago. Kid only moves to go to sleep. Trash is building up. No other chores are getting done. Chores dashboard is flashing red. Take out trash sprint way overdue.
The main chore I want a robot to do is laundry. I'd pay good money if a robot could simply put the clothes of the hamper in the laundry machine, transfer to the dryer, and then put them away.
Just buy a washer drier. Don't have a hamper just put the laundry in the machine until it is full then switch it on. Go out to work, come home to clothes washed and dried.
Granted, you do have to take them out and put them away.
In 2014, I was at Google and went to an open house event at the Google robotics lab in SF. The people I met there were nice. I almost applied for a job there. Then I looked up the person who would have been my boss. He was scowling in his Google profile photo. His LinkedIn showed him as founder of a robotics company, with no mention of Google. He obviously wanted to be the CEO of a robotics company, not a director in Google.
Google acquired many robotics companies in 2013. I believe most of the acquired companies' leaders had contracts requiring them to stay at Google for 4 years.
Did Google delay the progress of robotic technology by 4 years?
The VC model obviously helps enable human progress in many situations. But surely not all situations. How can we know when the VC model will be a net loss for humanity?
I'm glad to see those folks moving on and following their dreams.
Robotics technology is in the research phase. No big companies can be built from it yet. Researchers must do many more years of work before anyone can make useful robotics products. How can we get that work done faster?
Compare two cases:
1. Founders spend 6 months setting up a company and selling it to VCs. Then they develop for 2 years. The VCs want an early exit so they shop the company around and Google decides to buy. The founders and all employees must sign a 4-year contract or walk away with nothing. They sign. They waste 6 months on the acquisition process. Google mismanages the new teams. Google's CEO fails to put someone with customer focus in a position with power. There is no SVP of Robotics Products. Morale dives and then productivity dives. After 4 years, they all leave and spend a year recovering from burnout and setting up a new company to finally get back focusing on research. In 8 years, they have spent 2 years on high-productivity robotics research, 4 years on low-productivity research, and 2 years on logistics.
2. Founders spend 6 months setting up a company and securing grants. Then they develop for 7.5 years. In those 8 years, they have spent 7.5 years on high-productivity robotics research.
I believe there are other good ways to fund companies that have not yet been developed. VC does not fit all situations. Grants and bootstrapping have limitations. There are spaces for new funding models. What might they be?
A company reaching a massive size does not mean it’s been a net positive on society. In fact I’d argue that many previously beneficial companies have become net negatives once they got massive.
Your sample is wrong. We are comparing the number of successful new companies that came out of VC vs the number of successful new companies that came without VC.
...and it's easily obvious that almost all of the new large tech companies emerged from VC.
No, that's what you are doing.
What I'm doing is comparing the number of successful companies that came out given that the VC system exists versus a situation where it doesn't. We don't know how many potentially successful companies haven't been started, or got strangled in the crib, because of the dynamics of the VC ecosystem and the fact that it exists.
Also it's an error of remarkable proportions to assume that "massive company" is synonymous with "net positive to humanity", particularly in tech.
Is the problem VCs or much deeper just the nature of acquisitions.
The ideal acquisitions would least to synergy between the acquirer and acquiree. This would lead to a combination of reduced cost, improved products and the companies and consumers all win.
Unfortunately, it seems to me like this might describe a minority of real acquisitions, at least in tech. It seems like many acquisitions get fumbled and the original company and their products are now bad and literally nobody won from this but the owner of the original company having a nice excited. In many cases tough the goal of the acquisition even seems to be to eliminate competition which is terrible for the consumer and hurts the market. In that scenario I'd rather see companies "fight to the death" or find their respective niches.
I'm uncertain what impact it had on the market and industry that some companies now get started with the goal bring a acquisition by FAANG. I have no data or even anecdata, but intuitively it seems like something that would be interesting for an economist to do a study on.
An acquirer can't literally force someone to stay on as an employee for 4 years. What they typically do is set up a deferred compensation scheme (golden handcuffs) with a large guaranteed bonus payment or stock vesting at the end of that period. In some cases they also include a non-compete clause in the agreement which leaves the employee with few other employment options, although those are only enforceable in certain jurisdictions.
4 years at peak human population means a lot of human-years have transpired. And we've only been doing this oil burning industry thing for a few hundred. I think 4 years is quite a long time because of the scale of human progress.
Google was also more against developing military applications which have been the historic routes for developing physically realizable but costly technologies (such as the computer).
Nice. Certainly more affordable than the huge Willow Garage machine, although that could fold laundry. This thing will probably be showing up in robot research labs. If they sold a reasonable number it could be much cheaper.
The arm is not very rigid. Notice there's a barcode target on the end effector base (the "wrist") where the camera can see it. So the system can compensate for some bend. That's in some ways better than building a super-rigid structure.
I'm surprised there isn't a camera or two out at the end of the arm, for fine positioning. Cell phone camera parts are so cheap now that's a no-brainer.
It just goes to show you the latent "value" of having a FAANG position on your resume. People are always looking for shortcuts to making value judgments about people/ideas, and this is another one of those shortcuts.
That's funny. Just yesterday I wrote a blog post that mentioned telerobotics [1], as I've become interested in how the global economy has changed since 1990.
The book I was reading that inspired it (which I thoroughly recommend) [2] talked about how telerobotics was going to help break down the last of three constraints on globalisation: moving people.
The other two are: cost of movement of goods (1st modern industrial revolution); and the cost of moving knowledge (the 2nd modern revolution, since 1990).
One of the things argued is that cleaners and dog walkers (for example) can't be moved, so a paradox of high skills economies is that certain low-skill jobs become more valuable.
$20K is getting frighteningly close to start making it more economical to have someone operate such a cleaning machine remotely from a low cost area than hiring a local cleaner. Skilled operators could even (with the help of AI?) operate dozens of these at once. Or they could do the 'easy' stuff, and get a 'proper' local cleaner in once in a while to do the tricky bits or a deep clean.
That's an interesting train of thought, but I hope it is not the future. The world population is still growing. Labour is still the biggest wealth distribution system for most people. To eliminate "low-skill" jobs seems like an inhumane way forward. It will likely increase inequality.
Also to take your example: walking a dog can also be considered a high-skill job. Sure you don't need a degree, but you need empathy and kindness. Pretty hard to teach to some people.
Keep in mind the videos in the article were sped up 6-10x, and even at that speed they were painfully slow compared to what a human could do in person.
If you can hire a remote operator to control a robot for half of the hourly wage that you would have to pay for someone to show up in-person to perform the same task that's still not anywhere close to economical if the robot also takes 10x as long, even if you ignore the up-front cost of the robot itself.
In order for something like that to make sense the robots would either have to become comparable to humans in the speed at which they are able perform their respective tasks, or the tasks would need to be at least partially automated so that an operator can control multiple robots at once.
Actually, I imagine these robots connected to video game consoles so people with OCD from around the world can compete to see who can clean and organize real houses faster or more efficiently... Who needs a gig economy when you can gameify it!
Until 4chan comes and makes a challenge about who can remotely burn down a house faster. I think you need someone being personally responsible that the robot does not destroy stuff and people will not do this for free.
I saw some demo where a guy in Germany remotely operated a large excavator on the other side of the world. I think there will be more of these in the future.
It would have challenges if it worked with people nearly,as then it can go south pretty quickly. However,the demo was some digging im mines,which isn't too bad if there are no peopl around.
A lot of the huge equipment (trucks etc.) in Australian mines is already either remotely controlled or completely autonomous, precisely because there are no people around and the mines are so remote there are no surprises
Why remote? There's plenty of people nearby you can hire that can do the job better, faster, and cheaper.
The only downside is that you've got a real person in your house, but honestly if that's a hangup then you need to suck it up and just do the work yourself.
(1) no "foreigner in my home" cleanliness issue - especially pertinent during these dimes
(2) no "will the cleaner steal my golden watch / company's data" issue - you can always just replay the video and see exactly what the operator was doing / looking at
(3) ability to hire different people remotely - not just cleaners, but maybe repairmen, doctors, chefs, ...
Cheaper really depends on where you live and it often won't be faster unless they live in your house. Want to put some dishes in the dishwasher? First call someone to make an appointment, wait for them to arrive, explain what they need to do. It would end up being much slower and more effort than someone just remote controlling a robot.
I'm always surprised how much these things cost. A 3 axis CNC is basically a 3 degree-of-freedom robot, yet only costs a few hundred dollars. I think we'll see mobile autonomous robots come into people's homes only after they:
- fall to low thousands price range
- do something useful (ie. not just a "social robot")
I think you forgot a zero there. A 3 axis CNC mill usually costs a few thousands of dollars. There are some crappy CNC engravers and dirt cheap 3D printers but the rigidity requirements are so low that they are a completely different class of machine.
There is a pretty big range of prices. The cheap Chinese ones aren't necessarily well built but they work fine for hobbyist stuff.
Motors, motor controllers + motion system are cheap enough for affordable home robots I think. The problem is automating actual tasks with the limitations of the motor controls.
Cheap 3 axis CNC machines are very dumb (I broke a home built machine once because there were no end stops and I programmed it wrong (stepper motors are very powerful)).
And there are professional CNC machine costing waay more than this robot.
I think you are comparing apples with oranges. The price is also for a development kit. So I can imagine the price could be at least half if they sold a few thousand of them.
a CNC does not have a perception/reaction loop and is no more a robot than a dot matrix printer might be. the cheap cnc machines don’t even have closed loop control. it certainly isn’t solving any of the right problems.
is anything with a motor a robot? of course there is a hierarchy, with the stepper-driven open-loop machine he gave as an example being further down the ladder.
No, I mean literally. Industrial arms aren't necessarily any more complex than CNC machines. They may not have any more motors. They perform tasks of similar complexity, with similar programming models. We call them "robot arms" quite happily.
this is inaccurate in a variety of dimensions. they have more complicated gearing (strain-wave) and and perception systems for safety (for nearby humans) and positioning (unless you can get the stunning tolerance stacking that the automotive industry gets.)
Alternative title: "Startup offers one armed, remote controlled 20.000$ robot on wheels with limited autonomous capabilities"
What's the use case besides novelty purposes? Who is supposed to buy this? Solely quadriplegic people come to mind but even that is a stretch and it's far too expensive. This is lightyears away from being a useful consumer object like a vacuum robot. If this is peak robotics, it is very disappointing.
> Solely quadriplegic people come to mind but even that is a stretch and it's far too expensive.
No, it's not. $20k is peanuts compared to the cost of in-home care, especially since that would probably be pro-rated over ~5 years. If they can keep it in that price range and make it useful for simple household tasks (get something from the fridge/pantry/closet, put things in trash, operate a microwave or toaster oven, etc.), this could change a lot of people's lives for the better.
The potential here is amazing. It's very early days, but this is the first Robot I've seen that makes me think home assistant robotics is technically and financially feasible. It does not need to be consumer priced from day one as there are many high value scenarios that could benefit from this robot. For example, home care in Europe costs governments millions every year. Even remotely controlled by a carer would be an application for today.
I would love to be as positive as you. Let's say minimum wage is $15 an hour, what task do you think this robot could do, and how many hours of labour will it save? I don't want to be overly negative, but to honest the way it comes across to me is they've taken a roomba, glued a stick on top of it, zip tied a hoover onto it, and invented a slow, bad roomba.
In the demo video, for every basic task it needs some setup by a human (see how they fixed stuff on the stretchable arm for every action other than picking-up something) and all the interesting tasks were teleoperated.
I don't care about teleoperation, for a home robot I want automation.
Mobile base with a long stick on top, camera on top of the stick and arm moving up and down the the stick: I'd say that's a proven design featured in many custom-built robots for RoboCup@Home.
It's so obvious what is needed to help these take off: an app/skill store with an easy development environment. Would assume the order goes something like this:
$20k robot -> robot app/skill store -> Killer apps??? -> More volume ->... $3k robot -> More apps/skills -> $1k robot -> Everyone has one.
1) Most expensive individual third-party components would be all the servos together, then the computer, then the realsense, then the lidar. All the custom body panels and custom cut carbon fiber extrusions are expensive now, cheap when scaled.
2) 5,000 - 50,000? Right now it's about twice as expensive per kilo as a Lamborghini Aventador, and they only made ~4,000 of those. It needs to be 18x cheaper to hit your price target, and that wouldn't be impossible at scale. A big chunk of the price tag is generous margin (because they don't know how many they'll sell) and paying for the software, which amortizes well. Those costs go away at scale, but then you need to spin up tech support and a repair department. I do tech support for educational robots, and I can tell you it's not... simple, or profitable.
Getting to that number would be hard. The design of the robot is wonderfully simple, (great! delightful!) but it's too easy to clone: the only complicated bit is the telescoping arm. Everything else is open source or commodity parts off the shelf. If they actually do sell a thousand of these, the Chinese will rush in and eat their margin. I hope either they have patents and some aggressive lawyers, or friends high up in the Biden administration, because if the design is successful, their company won't survive international competition.
The telescoping arm is cute, and provides benefits for reaching into constrained spaces like a washing machine, but in the first clones it would likely be replaced with the standard "cylindrical" (e.g. industrial robot style) arm.
Hard to imagine that they could have gotten a patent on "robot arm on Segway". The elevator part though?
A conventional arm? Oh no thank you. Heavier, need a motor out on the elbow joint with another expensive low-backlash gearbox, mast has to be heavier to support the off-axis torque loads, grasp trajectories have another DOF or two. Skip that, please. And it's not like conventional arms are even cheap! If you could buy a decent 1.5 kilo payload arm for less than $5k, you'd have a whole different argument.
From the way the telescoping arm moves, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it's driven by a flex-tape linear actuator. Pretty cheap, lets you put the heavy motor right next to the mast, no precision bearings, backlash not so much a problem.
The whole package really is a great design, I'm a big fan. You can tell Edsinger has been using robots out in the real world, with regular people beating them up.
Robotics founder with four years' experience on the ground in China here. You could make one for retail for <$1000 now, although the telescoping motion system on the depth axis would likely need to be downgraded, and you'd drop the name brand sensors.
I've been wondering about the cost of motors used in robots. For many robots it's actually the main cost, but why are they so expensive and will we realistically see cheap, powerful servos in the near future?
Usually the most expensive parts of a robot is sheer number and compounding effects of various components and requirements...
A motor may cost $5 but driver costs another $5 and cables costs another and you have to stack it against one another and if it has to support its own weights the motor must be better and if motor is better the driver etc etc and those keep snowballing.
Contrarian point of view -- (edit) this clever device overall takes too much capital and solves no real problem, meanwhile pressing and urgent problems needing tech, remain unaddressed, year after year.
For centuries, real, physical actions in home life were improved with (mainly mechanical) devices subject to patent. The industrial revolution provides vast flows of consumer goods. Finance prospered (mainly) with loans, interest, and selling inventions like these, on large markets.
Fast forward 100+ years. Daily life is unimaginably easy, due to mass market goods for cheap, standardized living and generally, massive energy use. Markets constantly create products designed to be profitable given some game rules. Yet, there are diminishing returns. Vast, serious, ok yes urgent challenges face individuals and society, right now, and have been known for several decades.
An analogy might be the stunning success of mathematics in physics over the last 100+ years, sends multiple other soft sciences scouring math for certain curves or constants, because it worked for physics. Repeatedly, social science for example, is subject to physics-like curves and constants, searching for computable understanding, which is probably not appropriate to the endeavor.
The market is scouring product space, using formulas from long ago, to make the "killer" product. They say it here in the comments. This is to make money for people who are already very wealthy, using formulas that include massive diminishing returns (huge capital, you bet), and basically solve no real problem. Labor is over-abundant in modern times. People are living in isolation in Western Cities, and this is an isolation device. A very modest arrangement with a living person who needs work to earn money in the city, would solve the "problem" here, and requires no capital.
I suggest these talented, funded inventors look more deeply at the real ecosystem we are faced with overall, and get off of the gerbil wheel of get-rich personal consumption devices, because overall, societal survival actually does depend on tech right now.
As feedback, this comment took forever to get to the point. It would really benefit readers if you just started with: ‘Contrarian point of view - we don’t need these devices in society because we have an abundance of human labour for that and there are far bigger problems in society to be solved.’ It’s best to get your conclusion out there early rather than relying on the reader to find it.
You don’t really provide much of an argument for not using or developing a device like this other than there’s an abundance of human labour. What about if this device became much cheaper than human labour?
To your other point about other problems to be solved, if we only ever worked on the problems pivotal to humankind (e.g. global warming) then a lot of things that are useful but not pivotal to human existence would never have been invented.
I hate seeing this in every single Reddit or HN thread about the future of energy. Nuclear power is a great option but it isn't the end all be all of energy. It's just another (probably less harmful than fossil fuels) stopgap.
I'm looking forward to the day a small home robot can do the dishes, in the sink – replacing a dishwasher machine. This looks like a small step in that direction.
I just checked homedepot.com, and a search for "dishwasher" brings up options from $400 to $550.
It would be.... optimistic... to expect any household robot for anywhere near the same price to do that job as well and as durably as a conventional dishwasher. Which, I should point out, can wash dishes for years with no maintenance at all!
I am not ordinarily a pessimistic man, but I would expect to see major, society-destroying levels of technological unemployment from advanced automation long before we see a dishwashing robot.
But if you look at the last 10y of breakthrough advances in vision, text/language understanding, sensors, electric motors, & goal-directed training, and project them out another 10-20y... it's just a matter of time, isn't it?
Of course it's a matter of time. But it's a little like watching the nuclear fireball rise over the Trinity test site and think "Wow, I can't wait to use this technology for radioisotope imaging." That's one thing that it can be used for, yes! There are others.
I can't toss a plate covered in food (or even really food residue) into the dishwasher. When I can do that I'll be happy with the under sink contraptions we have now.
That’s the exact opposite of how most robotics are going for more specialized machines, not less. It is an interesting prospect, but what would be saved in space would be lost in more energy and water used (not to mention hygiene, we’ve used our dishwasher a lot more since we have had a kid to disinfect).
Are you sure a set of robot arms, trained over many generations to minimize motion/water/energy use, while also minimizing dirty dishes, would necessarily use more water/energy than a dishwasher?
What if the dishwasher is sometimes run half-full?
And it seems like an actual first step, as opposed to the various gimmicky anthropomorphs we've gotten used to seeing. If this thing could be set to clean the kid's room during a working day, or programmed to water the plants when I'm away, that's substantial progress.
It takes me an inordinate amount of time to place objects into the dishwasher so that it doesn't have 50% wasted space. Also if you eat East Asian dishes you will have tons of sticky bits of rice, and a dishwasher never seems to be able to scrub them. (Maybe it will if I run it extra hot, but then it will damage plastic lids. You can't win.)
General-purpose arms that can, as a matter of software, do dishes could take up less space, put the clean dishes away, and then do other things, too, like simple food prep, surface cleaning, other 'straightening up', etc.
I see this being used by low cost remote operators to cleanup your room or do your laundry. Autonomy is still a gimmick, but imagine if you can pay $50/month so that a reliable remote operator (entire armies of call centres will turn into remote robot operators) swipes every surface with a cloth?
A lot of excellent discussion here. A few years back at CES, I saw the concept of an appliance that will automatically fold your laundry. It was amazing to see (yet IMO a hoax). I maintain a robust and cheap solution to make the bed or fold laundry could be a game changer.
The main thing I see missing in these comments is the approach from the other end. There will be a tipping point where appliance makers design small features to make their products “robot friendly.” Like making openings larger, buttons larger and otherwise easier for cheaper robots to interact with. And it will create a feedback loop where robots get more popular because they can do more in a robot enabled home, and because they are more popular they get better, and because they are better they get more popular.
Let’s be honest, the roomba sucks, so It’s not really a counter argument.
Once there is a robot that is useful and also seen as a status symbol, that’s when the feedback loop will begin.
"As of right now, Stretch is very much a research platform."
That was buried way too low in the article for most HN commenters to bother getting to. Maybe this fact will help refocus the conversation from what this thing can't do to what it might be able to with some more work. Personally, I think it looks innovative. Adding a relatively inexpensive telescoping arm and some LiDAR to a Roomba could be another evolutionary step forward in home robotics.
I can easily imagine wiring this thing up to Alexa and asking it to go get me a drink from the fridge. That alone would be worth a few hundred bucks when it becomes a commercial product.
Stretch™ Research Edition
A new kind of robot.
[…]
A Robot for Researchers by Researchers
I couldn’t find specs on typical battery life (would likely vary a lot, but still, any indicator would help) but it has an 18Ah battery (ballpark “3 laptops”), an Intel i5-8259U, 16GB of RAM and a 480GB SSD.
We know how to make fast robots, we know how to make safe robots, and we know how to make useful robots. But we do not know how to make fast, safe, useful robots. A faster robot would need to be heavier to do the same work.
Any robot that can move as fast as a human and perform similar work to a human will need to be close to as strong/heavy as a human. And humans can kill each other with their bare hands; we just know not to. A Kuka LBR iiwa can only lift 7-14kg, but could easily accidentally kill/maim someone with common payloads of that mass.
Obviously there's also some slowness w.r.t. the actual control here (i.e. safety pauses, planning latency, etc.), but it's a tall order to build any kind of home robot - especially one that has such a large workspace - that is intelligent enough to be both fast and safe.
Already now this looks like a very useful tool for a person who is bound to a wheelchair. It can easily reach things at different heights, including floor level, which is hard from a wheelchair. Its base is smaller than a wheelchair, so it can get into narrower spaces. Such person probably has an open, level, and uncluttered floor plan already, which works well for the robot. Accessories, such as the vacuum cleaner, can be installed by the operator (after the robot fetches them). Autonomy is great when it works, but even slow teleoperation is better than having to have a helper around 24/7.
> he hopes to see the robot deployed in home environments,
It will need bigger wheels or legs then because it would be stuck in one room in my house because of the thresholds at each doorway and the rugs and carpets.
And my house has three stories so I would need three of them because it can't climb stairs.
It's getting tiresome to read crap like this because while it might work in a dwelling purpose built for it it is guaranteed useless in most dwellings occupied by real people right now.
I admire the hard work that surely went into this, but I have to say: as a former robotics hobbyist, I'm extremely unimpressed with the weight, cost, and limited capabilities of this thing. And that impression is based on the technology we had over a decade ago. With access to a few machine tools and a 3d printer, I'd bet an equally capable prototype would cost no more than a few hundred dollars. No wonder almost no one has a robot in their home.
I think this should be looked at similarly to e-readers that came before Kindle or smartphones from before the iPhone. It's not 'there' yet, but it shows the directions things can go, and can help pave the way toward something that deserves mass adoption. Bringing down the price is a big step, so more people can try it out and maybe even discover a niche where it's already 'good enough' for some task.
Obviously the design is not perfect, but I think this is a step in the right direction, as in, a robot does not have to be a bipedal humanoid to be useful.
> “I had this idea that there are these assistive grabbers that people with disabilities use to grasp objects in the real world,” he told us. Kemp went on Amazon’s website and looked at the top 10 grabbers and the reviews from thousands of users. He then bought a bunch of different ones and started testing them. “This one [Stretch’s gripper], I almost didn’t order it, it was such a weird looking thing,” he says. “But it had great reviews on Amazon, and oh my gosh, it just blew away the other grabbers. And I was like, that’s it. It just works.”
I can totally imagine this being Amazon's next big play. They already have a decent in-house robotics team working on warehouse automation. Some of that knowledge could be spun-off into a consumer robotics unit. Alphabet will be left catching up again like with AWS and Echo.
Robots have a big problem - price tag. Research robot for $18k, Spot for $75k, single robot arm moving stuff from A to B - $50k+. How many organizations can afford that? No wonder, that robot adoption is extremely slow.
If something like this succeeds to the point of mass production, I could easily see the retail price been cut by 75% or more. That might be a big "if", though.
I imagine a bit of the current price tag is "we want serious purchasers who will be partners in the development of this device"; they don't want to build them for people who will just dick around with it for a bit and then relegate it to the corner of the room.
Yeah I don't think the world needs household robots that are disposable. I'd expect them to be a similar investment to a high end car in the interest of a lower total cost of ownership over long timeframes. It would ultimately be very expensive to make wave upon wave of "cheap" high tech landfill fodder.
What I'd like to see is standardized interchangeable parts and configurable software so we can spec robots to their tasks and benefit from reuse of parts and code as much as possible.
Exactly. At mass production, the marginal cost of building a robot will be similar to that of an automobile. The value it provides (depending on the application) will be similar too, if not greater.
It's because they're specialist gear for generic purposes; if they discover a problem that can be solved by automation, they'll invent and mass produce a machine for a singular task (reading other comments, think of dishwashers and washing machines. They're robots for a specific task, price-optimized down to the $250 - $1000 price range)
At the point when control algorithms get good enough for them to be easily trainable to high performance on varied tasks, that price becomes quite cheap.
Are any tele-robots used in agriculture? I could imagine using AI to get the robot hands within a few inches of each piece of produce or a desired task and then one operator could quickly swap between many robots.
Something the Stretch bot gets right is that it doesn't trigger uncanny valley revulsion like the torso-shaped PR2 does with its Terminator eyes. They managed to make this bot feel like an appliance or a mobile coat hanger - almost like an endearing doofus. I think this will be key to mass adoption.
The base looks like the clearance is too low and wheels too small, but otherwise a nice idea. I'd imagine you could replace the base with a quadruped for better mobility.
People are complaining about what this can't do, but for the disabled, the simple things it can do is going to be monumental. I see this as an amazing tool for the disabled, not a "beer me bot" for the lazy.
EDIT: And I should add, I hope they market this to that severely underserved market. If they only market it as a product for the rich to do simple tasks, it will suffer Segway's fate. If they create a market for it in healthcare and partner with those already in that space, this could be something big. It would pay for itself for people who need 24/7 care, if it were reliable enough.
Seems like progress in personal robotics has been incremental at best ever since Paulie had that robot deliver him a drink way back in Rocky IV (1985).
imagine thousands of years ago, if you were very rich, you would stay away from rivers because of the risk of flooding - but you still needed a source of water - so you hire people to carry water from the streams to your home.
how would you automate that? by building robots to carry the water containers? what is the optimal solution may not be the most obvious.
They dropped the ball on the demo. If they really wanted to blow me away they'd have demonstrated the robot opening the fridge and bringing me a beer.
A bit more seriously, this is a research platform. Maybe in 5-10 years it'll prove to be the seed of some interesting tech, but right now it's just a lab experiment. If you buy this and expect it to do basic housework for you, you are destined to be disappointed.
Most normal people would take that as a sign that the founder has already had a sucessful career in tech, because "FAANG" don't hire mediocre workers. The journalists knowing this trend, use this information to communicate this to people, speaking in their language. (Also this language makes some sense as well.) I don't see a problem.
Their propaganda is working well I see. Having a Stanford degree and being able to answer CS questions (two things FAANG companies love) does not guarantee you'll be a good worker.
I don't know anything about home robots, but to me this seems to be the first design that is practical to bring to consumers. Not 2 human arms (or even legs) and some expensive face, but instead just a Roomba-ish base, telescope arm with grabber that moves up and down, camera on top.
Unfortunately, looking at it I doubt they would get the price point down to $1.8k easily. Maybe $5k at a push, but more than likely some consumer edition might cost more or less the same.
That said, I doubt this bot will ever make it to the stage of being a consumer bot. The sorts of problems that need to be solved are on the scale of that of autonomous vehicles, probably even harder.
Feels like it would overbalance given how lightweight and tall it is - any time it tried to pick anything up that was even slightly heavy it would just fall over.
Detecting how heavy an object is would be possible - also those grippers will simply not grasp something too heavy. Your big problem will be simply in not detecting some object that coat-hangers it.
Let's not pretend a consumer model is even remotely ready though, these scenarios are highly contrived. The goal at the current time is research, and at that price point there are a few options available.
- go up stairs
- get up after a fall / reset itself
- pick up heavy objects
- precise motion (so no cooking)
- interact with buttons or touch screens (so laundry might be hard)
The one use case I think it might be worth it is if the robot can take a room full of toys and return everything back to where it belongs. Kind of like a one click, reset this room. If it can help me keep organized and clean around the house that would be a big win. Also, if it can help me detect which clothes are still wearable and which I should probably wash, that'd be nice.
I'd gladly pay 5k for a robot that can auto-organize my stuff around the house, even if it involves a lot of customization and setup. Imagine leaving your groceries next to the fridge and coming back to a perfectly organized fridge. Or letting your kids play in the play room and then the robot comes in and puts all the toys back. Or if you just tend to leave stuff out (throw your clothes on the floor or forget to return stuff), the robot can put it back.
I think that's a legit use case.