The State of Household Robots

paulelaguna writes "The dream of owning a household robot is starting to become reality, particularly for people in Japan. There are robots to help you do the dishes, move furniture, and even robotic wheelchairs to help you get around. Really, the only question that remains for us is when do we move?"

Just like virtual reality and home automation

[Anrego]

I think this is one of those things that sounds a lot cooler and more practical than it is in actual implementation.

I'd rather a dishwasher wash my dishes then some humanoid robot.. for the plain fact that a purpose built machine is going to be a lot better at it.

I think there's lots of room for automated or semi-automated machines which I guess you could call robots.. but a "robotic butler" I don't see happening.

Personally I'm waiting for an automated lawn mower that doesn't suck!

Re:I have a household robot

[clarkkent09]

They will be more exciting when iRobot starts making them more reliable and sell them at a reasonable price again. The low end one used to be around $100 (I owned several) and it worked just as well as the more expensive ones, without some useless features like self-charging, and it came with replacement filters and two virtual walls. These days the cheapest one is $200 (basically the same robot as the one that used to be $100) plus you get zero filters and zero virtual walls. On top of that those are hard to find in stores and they try really hard to sell you the $300+ ones (500 series) which don't really clean any better either and are even less reliable. Where is the Japanese competition when you need it...

Eve no Jikan/Time of Eve

[B1ackbeard]

For those into Japanese animation, check out this short series set in the near future Japan where household androids are commonplace starting to become self aware. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Eve [wikipedia.org]

Re:Just like virtual reality and home automation

[MichaelSmith]

A better way might be to replace the dishes, cups, etc with little robots. Or possibly build RFID tags into them so that the household robot knows what to pick up, and what to leave alone.

Re:Just like virtual reality and home automation

[delinear]

I guess somewhere like Japan where space is limited and you pay a premium for it, the more devices you can combine into one unit the better.