How Long Until We Have a Home Robot That Lives Up To the Hype? 114
moon_unit2 writes: You may have heard of "personal robots" such as Jibo, Buddy, and Pepper. One journalist recently met one of these home bots and found the reality less dazzling than the promotional videos. Whereas the Indiegogo clips of Buddy show the robot waking people up and helping with cooking, the current prototype can only perform a few canned tasks, and it struggles with natural language processing and vision. As the writer notes, the final version may be a lot more sophisticated, but it's hard to believe that real home helpers are just around the corner.
Reality less dazzling than the hype? (Score:2, Funny)
You mean like 3D printing?
Well, the thing is the robots... (Score:3)
... aren't good at dealing with shit just being anywhere in the house. They like things to be predictable. They're also really bad at identifying objects. I saw a thing in a lab where they had a robot that was doing a pretty good job of recognizing stuff. But are they going to be able to recognize the difference between a clean plate, a dirty plate, and a plate with food on it? And if they can't do that then they can't clear a table. Just a really basic thing you would want a home robot to do. Forget whether it has the arms to move any of that. If it can't tell the difference between these things then it can't clear a table.
When people say "personal home robot" what I think they're looking for is a robotic maid. Rosy the robot. Pick my crap up. Dust. Organize things. Clean. Make me food. Clean up. etc.
The roomba etc are about as close as we've gotten to that. And the roomba has so many fucking problems.
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For some reason, that reminded me of a friend's blind dog. He loved when everyone came over for poker night but he hated that we moved all the furniture in the living room. He'd bump into a couple things then sigh and wait for someone to lead him to the yard or sofa or wherever he was trying to get.
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You know.. some people chose NOT to move their furniture around when they have blind pets.
Just sayin...
Roomba technology (Score:2)
When people say "personal home robot" what I think they're looking for is a robotic maid. Rosy the robot. Pick my crap up. Dust. Organize things. Clean. Make me food. Clean up. etc.
The roomba etc are about as close as we've gotten to that. And the roomba has so many fucking problems.
To be entirely fair, until we get further along with room temperature superconductors, you just can't build something like a Roomba without the cat ass magnets.
Re:Roomba technology (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, Roombas are mostly fine. My issue with them more than anything is that they're stupid, don't interface with say a program running on a computer that could make them less stupid, and they've unacceptably high maintenance issues.
The vacuum robots are getting decent. I'd like them to be clever enough to actually have a map of the room and know where they are in it... etc But what really annoys me most about them is that they have too many plastic parts in them. Most of the plastic in the guts of the roomba should be metal... ideally steel. Grit and other assorted shit gets into the gears and that creates friction and the friction creates heat. My last roomba ate itself. It melted its guts out.
You can get after market metal guts to replace the shitty plastic modules that should be made out of stamped stainless steel plate. And that largely resolves the maintenance issues.
However, I still think they should be smarter or should interface with something that is smarter. Have the thing connect via wifi to your network... ideally in a non-mickey mouse way... and then have a more substantial computer do the heavy lifting for it. I'm talking about the sort of thing a Raspberry pi could handle without breaking much of a sweat.
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They have to be that way because they're so stupid. The ENTIRE robot has to fit under your furniture. It doesn't understand how to clean under something without going entirely under it.
As to the size of the things... a bit more size would be a good idea. I'd also like it if they didn't put in any sneaky backdoor business plan into the thing such as "well, you just paid 200-500 dollars for this vacuum that works about as well as 50 dollar vacuum. Lets continue the fuckery by drilling you for whatever the stu
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yeah, more sensors, more capability, more brain power.
Someone will say "but then it will cost so much!"...
Each sensor costs about 1 to 10 dollars with more being 1 dollar than not. When it comes to capability What does a dust buster cost? 15-25 dollars... so if we have two of those... one that does dry and the other that does wet... 50 dollars to be generous. And brain power... a raspberry pi costs 25-35 dollars... and the rest is just some motors that are going to cost somewhere between 1 dollar and 20 dol
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Oh, Roombas are mostly fine. My issue with them more than anything is that they're stupid, don't interface with say a program running on a computer that could make them less stupid, and they've unacceptably high maintenance issues.
I don't understand the stupidity complaint; they are about as smart as they need to be in order to clean the entire floor which is reachable by a vacuuming robot that is 2D constrained. Making them smarter would only be useful for something like "avoid this area"; what other uses do you foresee could be applied, other than "don't go there" and "frequency of operation for a given area"? I suppose you could have "delay operation on Saturdays for 2 hours, as I will be hung over", and other scheduling stuff..
Re:Roomba technology (Score:4, Interesting)
They have no memory of the room even though they routinely operate in the same room.
They do not know where doors are, where given activities happen, etc and thus cannot know where the focus of any cleaning should be.
Their programming is too limited to allow for a larger more effective robot because they're too stupid to clean under things properly the way a human would.
As someone else in the thread said, they don't understand that some things they're touching actually should be left alone. One guy was talking about how his roomba just spread cat vomit all over the place because his cat will throw up... as cats do... and then the roomba will roll over it and wipe cat vomit all over the place.
There are an enourmous number or problems with the brain of the thing. And I appreciate that it isn't economical to put that kind of brain power into the roomba... so don't. Most of the robots you see coming out of DARPA these days have most of the brains outside of the robot itself. Its all software running on a laptop or something. And if required for the brain to be in the machine for some competition they just make a cradle for the laptop ON the robot and just put the laptop on the robot.
So there you go... Roombas don't have the brain power they should. They should have a detailed 3d map of the area they operate in, they should know where things get dirty both from logging done by the roomba itself and by what a human would program into it by saying "here are doors".
A bigger robot could do a better job cleaning. Anyone that uses a roomba knows that it takes it DAYS to clean a room and it only keeps rooms clean at all because the fucking thing is scurrying around every day doing about as much cleaning in a week as I would in 30 minutes once a week. That limitation limits how much the roomba can clean. It should be able to clean an entire house. My vacuum cleaner... the one I as a human use... can clean the entire house. But the Roomba can't do that. It can't navigate the house and say "clean this room today" and "that room tomorrow"... and its so inefficient in the way it clean any room that it has to clean the same room several times to actually clean it at all.
And as the man said... cat vomit... or anything gross... gets spread around everywhere.
I could go on... but if you tell me it is as smart as it needs to be, I disagree. The thing it doesn't do which really pisses me off is it can't navigate and doesn't have a map of the house. That's the dumbest.
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They have no memory of the room even though they routinely operate in the same room.
I would call this a feature, rather than a drawback, since obstacles such as doors could be open or closed, and obstacles such as dining chairs may move around. Given that, a static map would be a detriment, rather than a benefit.
They do not know where doors are, where given activities happen, etc and thus cannot know where the focus of any cleaning should be.
OK, I already conceded "frequency of operation for a given area"; however for their mop-bot or for shag carpet, either is going to look funny if you don't do all of it, so I'm not sure that's an issue. As long as it does all of it, yes, it's doing unnecessary vacuuming, but no mo
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1. As to floor mapping being a bad idea because furniture moves. The general goal here is to permit the unit to navigate the house. The Hom Bot seems to negate your furniture issue by mapping the ceiling instead.
Though frankly, I think you could let the thing roam around your house and map it... then import the map into you computer... and explain to the software what is and is not furniture.
And regardless, just because it maps it, it doesn't mean that it won't still be keeping its eyes open. it will try to
Re: Roomba technology (Score:3)
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Yep. I kept finding mine under my bed or something with half a sock in its maw.
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Hmm, my Roomba allows for different scheduling each day of the week, so the Saturday thing isn't a big deal. The 'virtual lighthouse" and "virtual wall" (one unit, with a switch to selec
Re:Roomba technology (Score:4, Informative)
LG's Hom Bot maps rooms. It uses a camera pointed at the ceiling to create a map, as well as the usual IR distance and bump sensors. Neato make one with lidar that does a similar thing.
The LG robot is pretty good. It learns the room and then doesn't bump into things as much. The only problem is that it only has one map, so if you say take it upstairs it has no idea where it is and is more or less as dumb as the rest of them. It is really quiet though and does an excellent job of cleaning.
The Neato is junk, unfortunately. The batteries die quickly due to poor power management, and the lidar doesn't seem to help it much.
The thing is, a cheap Lidl robot that only has a bump sensor is not that much worse, and costs a fraction as much. It may be dumb and doesn't have a brush roller, but it's persistent. Simply by covering the same area repeatedly it eventually lifts quite a lot of dust. So there are rapidly diminishing returns for intelligence and advanced sensors.
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The LG thing looks viable. I'd prefer if it were bigger and had the ability to deal with... lets say an entire melting scoop of rocky road ice cream... just to be polite. But the LG thing looks nearly like what I want.
I want it to interface with my computer. I want those room maps uploaded to the computer so there is no question of storage.
One thing that did worry me a bit with the hom bot was... I suspect its full of plastic garbage parts in its guts. That needs to stop. Steel plate is not expensive. You h
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First robvac was a Kärcher (same model was sold under Siemens name but not in my locale). Solid machine, basic random-pattern algorithm. Did a stellar job until /something/ fried it's motherboard. Deemed it too expensive to fix.
Then got an LG. Worked fairly well, but could apparently not determine the height of the "ceiling" it works under - goes under bed, got stuck there. A bit flimsy, broke while still under warranty, so just asked my money back.
So I went back to the manual process. I've been liv
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Sorry for replying to myself. LG was around 1/5 the price of the Kärcher.
My take is that the issue isn't with the machine's "brainpower" (a simple random pattern will do, albeit take longer). It is the actual sucking hardware that needs to not suck (oops for the pun). Anything round or rotating is bad at cleaning square corners and around many objects - you need something that goes right to the edge. You also need to have something robust enough to be able to handle sand, grit, stones and other small
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This feeds into my general opinion that every industry should work like the desktop PC industry... aka modular components. By all means... have custom enclosures and innovate your various modules. But have the fittings between module A and module B cooperate with each other.
That's not in the interest of some perhaps because they like to make shit but its in the consumer's interest.
I'd love to see everything work that way.
And funnier still, it is probably a huge environmental problem. Think about it. With al
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As to adding intelligence to it, actually my suggestion here is to give it a wifi uplink so that your existing computers in your house can do the thinking for it. I have a few machines that are always on. One is a media server for my TV and the other is a home work station and the others do other stuff. But the point is that any of them has free cycles it could donate to the vacuum bot... as well as more storage space than the fucking thing could ever want.
The raspberry pi comment was a reference to the com
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According to Roomba's own marketing information they suggest having one for every room.
That's fucking stupid. And it is only needed because the robot is fucking stupid.
The LG robot they were talking about elsewehre in the thread appears to be smarter. It maps the house and knows where it is. That's nifty. But the roomba doesn't and that's crap. Unless you live in a studio apartment... do not recommend.
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It doesn't seem to work very effectively in multi room situations. It invariably runs out of power in the second or third room and is unable to find its way back. And even if it does, it just revacuums the same areas it already vacuumed and peters out before it gets to the stuff it didn't do last time.
The LG Hom Bot appears to resolve that situation because it maps the ceiling which is innovative. And from that it is able to orrient in your home. So when it gets low, it returns directly and predictably to t
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... that's 710 square feet... or so... ehm... My last apartment was 800 square feet and had 3 rooms.
1. Living/dining/kitchen room
2. Bathroom
3. Bedroom
I don't know, I'm reacting more to the walls you have in your home which architecturally offend me.
Maybe its cultural. The fashion in the US these days is to have as few walls as possible to create as many large rooms as possible. Often a given room will have sections of it for different things. One part of the room had a dining room table, another had a couch
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Not really. You give it the existing bit of code that it already operates on if its independent. And when slaved to a computer via wifi, the unit would basically operate like a remote controlled car. The computer would tell it "go forward" "go Back" "turn left" "turn on your vacuum"... etc.
Would the code on the computer need to be debugged... the idea here would be that Roomba releases an API for operating their robot and then releases a default control program for various platforms. I have no doubt that if
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And the roomba has so many fucking problems.
Sounds like you're not using the roomba for its intended purpose. If you're looking for a robot that doesn't have fucking problems, you might just want to get a blow-up doll.
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Hey bingo, why would I need a blow up doll when I have your mother? She's always there to go from suck to blow for me. :D
You're so easy, bingo... when will you learn?
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... aren't good at dealing with shit just being anywhere in the house. They like things to be predictable. They're also really bad at identifying objects. I saw a thing in a lab where they had a robot that was doing a pretty good job of recognizing stuff. But are they going to be able to recognize the difference between a clean plate, a dirty plate, and a plate with food on it? And if they can't do that then they can't clear a table.
With Kids by the time they are old enough to really help with a task they don't want to do it. A three year old will happily help wash dishes by splashing and blowing foam around, but with a 12-year old its a case of "Oh no do I have to". I fully expect real effective household robots to be depressed and say "here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they want me to clean the bath tub"!
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Amusing but you're making the mistake steven hawking, Musk, and some other people made when they basically presumed an AI would be like a cartoon disney character... everything animated has feelings... and a face and personality and self awareness.
None of those things are required. When I say "self awareness" I don't mean ability to recognize yourself in a mirror. I mean it in the more philosophical sense of self awareness... as in understanding yourself in a larger picture and understanding the relationshi
A VERY long time (Score:1)
State-of-the-art autonomous robots are quite pathetic in their capabilities. In a (relatively free) environment like anybody's home they are lucky if they are able to take a couple of steps without bumping into something or just collapsing. Despite the hype coming from the AI and robotics worlds, such contraptions are good for grins and giggles, and very little else.
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And the number one reason that we don't have Robots is the Battery.
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We need to implement Asimov's three laws of robotics [auburn.edu] for any system that is strong/agile enough to injure humans.
Or perhaps these three laws [warrenellis.com].
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I'd settle for a good real-time collision detection/avoidance algorithm, so that the robot wouldn't knock into anyone. Most of what makes a robot dangerous is its lack of understanding of physics, not its lack of understanding of ethics.
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It always amuses me when I hear people advocating putting the Three Laws into robots. They don't work, and that's the point of every story Asimov wrote about them.
It Seems We Sure Work Hard To Be Lazy. (Score:1)
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Give it time (Score:4, Interesting)
Give it some time.
As any AI researcher will tell you, we know how the brain works and Geoffrey Hinton's recent paper [toronto.edu] is nothing short of a breakthrough, and will lead to us having strong AI programs real soon.
We have IBM's Watson, a program that actually understands the information it's processing and will be used to augment medical diagnosis, SIRI, a personal assistant application that actually learns, and MAKO, a program who can do anything on a PC! [youtube.com]
IBM is already making neural network chips [slashdot.org] that implement the way the brain really works, a program the learns the same way that a child learns [gizmag.com], and many, many more!
We have courses that teach you AI [udacity.com], and ... it's easy! [cs4fn.org]
Give it some time! We need to let the AI mature like a fine wine, and filter down into consumer devices.
It's coming soon - it really is!
Re:Give it time (Score:4, Insightful)
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Give it some time! We need to let the AI mature like a fine wine, and filter down into consumer devices.
The thing is, that consumer devices don't, themselves, *need* to have AI in them at all.
Try using Google Maps on your phone without an Internet connection. It's dead, Jim! Try using Siri without an Internet connection. Nope. Try using voice-to-text on your phone without a network connection. Bzzzzt!
AI doesn't need to be on your phone to be useful. As AI is developed, it'll be hosted in massive server farms (a la Watson) and time sliced for consumers. And even though we think AI will turn up in "high end" us
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The brain is far more than just neurons. As any biologists will tell you, we don't know how the brain works.
That paper makes a 0.25% improvement on previous attempts and is mainly about speeding up training. In no way is this a breakthrough that will lead us to strong AI. If all we need to do to get strong AI is increase training and processing speed, we would have strong AI right now. It'd just be slow strong AI that takes a day or two to decide what to do next. We don't have any system remotely near
Re: Give it time (Score:2)
Dude, you should go easy on the drugs
Re:Give it time (Score:5, Insightful)
An exaggeration, we know bits about how the brain works.
Lol, really, tech world have been saying this for decades.
No, it does not understand the information it's processing, stop making stuff up.
Again, these chips have been around for decades, nothing new.
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There are different kinds of AI, and some are much closer than others. For example, a Star Trek style computer that you can talk to in natural language isn't that far off I think. Google and Wolfram Alpha are getting to that stage, where for a lot of general information they can answer questions directly.
Interacting with the real world is the difficult part. Self driving cars are getting there, but it's not clear if that kind of system can be used to, say, make coffee or iron clothes, or if that will requir
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"Geoff Hinton knows how the brain works" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlXzufEk-2E
IBM's Watson doesn't understand anything. It just measures statistical correlations between pairs of things. Same for Siri
IBM's chips are based on spiking neurons. These will let existing algorithms run extremely fast, and are very useful, but are not "how the brain works".
There are fundamental (large) gaps in our understanding of how we think. We don't really know how it works at all, despite the hype.
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Home Robots Already Useful (Score:1)
I've been hand washing my clothes with something like a plunger for the past few months but I bought a washing machine last week. The washing machine is far easier to use, works better, and will make me lazier.
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This is more about hype than robots (Score:1)
Robots will *never* live up to the hype. Hype is there to get outsiders excited about something. I'm a robotics researcher, and even *inside* the community, people hype things in order to drum up interest. That's the point of hype.
The fact that things are sometimes overhyped doesn't detract from the fact that significant advancements are being made.
We have the technology (Score:2)
Natural language processing on my phone is getting pretty damn good.
I've seen machine vision used on security systems that you might find interesting. The object recognition is quite something-- it catalogs every new thing it sees, tracks it while visible, and is pretty successful at remembering things. Even the ol' Xbone is pretty decent; paired with some Roomba features I would think i
Twenty more years (Score:3)
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I think we'll have home robots but they will be a bit clumsy and they won't have real AI, they will instead have huge amounts of pre-programmed decisions and bits of fuzzy logic. The robots might have some bits of what we like to call AI but really isn't, these bits will be for image and voice processing only.
Home robots will require every task imaginable will have to be worked out one by one - and there will be hundreds perhaps thousands of tasks and sub-tasks. But a car is made of a thousand+ parts and th
We'll Have Robots That Live Up to the Hype... (Score:4, Funny)
We'll have robots that live up to the hype just as soon as we have wives that live up to the hype.
The first one that makes me a sandwich wins.
My, isn't my karma burning nicely...
We already have it, and its name... (Score:2)
If they are Fusion Powered... (Score:2)
Assuming that these Home Robots are fusion powered, they of course will always be 20 years away...
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Real Doll (Score:2)
I've heard someplace that they plan to put Siri-like voice response into them in addition to all the almost-not-uncanny valley stuff they do now to make it more "real". It wouldn't surprise me if something like a sex doll didn't become a more compelling home android than any general purpose one.
They're focused on a single use case, which means they focus on enhancing just the things that enhance that versus doing many things clumsily, They're also focused on realism in looks, touch and appearance. Doing
About as long as it took me to get my trip to the (Score:1)
I took the shuttle to the moonbase yesterday - It's a good thing that in 1999 the nuclear dump didn't blow up and send the moon hurtling off into deep space like the tv showed me in the 70's.
I think we're a bit behind on terraforming tho. I just wish the cost of plutonium fuel for my Underwater home reactor would drop, cause wow, it's still unobtanium.
Now, where's my food pills that contain everything I need to survive without having to actually eat - they have to be around here somewhere.... Damned old age
Re: Never (Score:2)
:rolleyes:
the kernel of truth there is people will want their AI's to cope with new situations which requires creative thinking. But creativity requires the ability to make mistakes and nobody wants a toaster that burns the toast. Hard AI that's actually marketable won't be very sellable.
Re:Never (Score:5, Insightful)
Emphasis on *SOME*....
In general, keeping a home clean entails a whole lot more than just vacuuming an area that is already free of clutter. It entails keeping the area free of clutter in the first place... This requires that a robot know where everything in the house belongs when it is put away, and will automatically clean and put things away that are left unattended for a sufficiently long period of time. Obviously, it should also know how to do this in a manner that does not in any way jeopardize the health or well-being of the occupants.
"We say we'd be happy with a robot that can clean our homes...." show me one that actually *CAN* clean my home, and we'll talk. Really, an oversized hockey-puck that can only vacuum one floor, can't do stairs, doesn't always cope well with pet fur, and can't figure out that just because it doesn't fit into an area right now because of how things happened to be positioned doesn't mean it shouldn't be vacuumed doesn't cover even half of the job of vacuuming for a lot of people, myself included, and probably not even a tenth of the total job of keeping a place clean and tidy. Forget about expecting cooking or driving kids to school or babysitting them or whatnot.... You claim that people are going to give AI a moving target when it comes to the matter of a robot housekeeper, how about just hitting the fucking original desired target of actually just keeping a house clean?
I'll tell you when (Score:1)
when the bot can drive my damned flying car.
Soon (Score:2)
I'll give you a clue... It'll be powered by cold fusion.
10 years, of course (Score:2)
They're about 10 years away.
And in 10 years, they'll be about 10 years away.
I'd settle for.... (Score:3)
Don't think I'll get it though.
Mr. Handy or bust. (Score:2)
Unless it can hover, has a sawblade and a blowtorch - and a humor emitter, what's the point? The Future is NOW!
Bad question (Score:1)
Reality always a downer vs fantasy (Score:1)
I think too many try to emulate fantasy like the Jetson's or Star trek or Hal. Trouble is, we do not have the technology or the processing power to instill such required
programing and function to make anything come close to fantasy that we create. But when we create robot's for example to do specific tasks or perform a series of tasks repeatedly. That is where robot's excel and can do good things. Why we are creating so many robot's to do all of the tasks we should be doing ourselves is very strange? Will t
Heinlein described them in 1956... so maybe 2056? (Score:2)
Robert A Heinlein gave quite detailed descriptions of household robots in his 1956 SF novel "The Door Into Summer" (although admittedly the novel's action is set in 1970 and later). The protagonist's company is called "Hired Girl", and he creates Flexible Frank, Drafting Dan, and finally Protean Pete. Whatever slight lacunae there may have remained in the engineering details, Heinlein had the marketing down pat.
For quite a good account of the novel, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. One of the footnote
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How you doin'?
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I want a robot to do household cleaning chores. Clean the bathroom, or at least the flat surfaces. Mop the tiled floors. Vacuum the carpets. Clean the windows. Possibly cle
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Professional cleaners are very competitive. You can pay a team of 3 to come into your place 1 time / month to do all the things you can't get to.
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Stuff like laundry? Not that big a deal when the machine does all of the work and I just have to load the wash, move the washed clothes to the dryer, and put them away when they're dry....
As you say, it's different things for different people. If you have an extended family, or have several small children, the laundry is simply absurd. It is something that you have to do basically every day. And it is a pain in the ass to have to check every pocket first (because otherwise you get pens, candy, or other stuff in the wash), un-ball them (since kids are amazingly good as making their clothes into tightly wrapped origami when taking them off), and then at the end folding a zillion shirts that
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Headphones. For my kids it's headphones. Dunno how many times they''ve washed their cheap Skullcandy sets. Miraculously, they still work after a wash or two. But they definitely lose some over time as they buy new ones every 6 months or so.
Heck, I thought I'd lost my nice Plantronics Bluetooth earphones when I left them in my pants and someone didn't hear me to get them out before starting the laundry...
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I want a robot to do household cleaning chores. Clean the bathroom, or at least the flat surfaces. Mop the tiled floors. Vacuum the carpets. Clean the windows. Possibly clean the patio and the sidewalks. Possibly deal with some of the kitchen cleaning. If the robot did this kind of cleaning daily then it never would be all that bad and consequently the robot wouldn't have to work very hard on any given day so long as it started out relatively clean.
HEY - robots exist for at least a few of the items you listed here. You really need to buy one if you haven't already! They're certainly not perfect but the vacuum and mopping robots I have work good enough for me. They keep the floors clean for me during the day, I just have to empty their canisters and throw the mop cloths in the laundry. I wish they'd make robots that can dust and vacuum stairs though :\
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Cooking dinner? I'd rather do that my self for the moment as I like variety, which I don't think a robot would be as good at compared to extremely repetitive cleaning tasks.
Invert it. Robots prepare the food and you cook it. It's pretty damn near what I do now for my dinner. When I lived in DC, I got used to a place called "Let's Dish" it's one of those places where you prepare your meals from a list of recipes each month. You then stick them in your freezer for when you need them. Later the 'cooking' is basically just adding heat/sautéing/baking and you have a full meal in 30 minutes or so. It ends up being cheaper for me because even with the overhead of "Let's D
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If you only have a female partner because she cleans, you're doing it wrong.
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See, bots can't even troll well yet