designed for industry The PR2 has an arm payload of 1.8kg, total payload of 20kg, and a top speed of 1m/s. That doesn't sound "industrial" to me, that sounds l

designed for industry The PR2 has an arm payload of 1.8kg, total payload of 20kg, and a top speed of 1m/s. That doesn't sound "industrial" to me, that sounds like "the absolute bare minimum to be a mobile anthropomorphic robot". And to achieve those numbers, it weighs 480 kilos! That's a payload fraction of 4.1%! How is this anything like a 747? If it only weighed a 60 kilos, the average weight of a human, then we would expect a total payload of 2.4kg, and an arm payload of... 7.3 grams. Doesn't sound too useful to me. And the damn thing would still cost $50,000! The PR2 was a VC backed monster, but remember, Willow Garage went out of business last year, because their products just weren't very useful! The technology just isn't there, and won't be for a long time. Home robot hackers falling in love with the super low power NUC I'm sure that's fine for pathing, and Kinect-SLAM, but "getting a beer from the fridge" is picking arbitrary items in arbitrary poses in an unconstrained environment, basically the Amazon Picking Challenge, which nobody can solve with reasonable speed yet, even with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. If you honestly think you can build a cheap robot that can do all that by 2020, then by all means, launch a startup and earn billions of dollars. But I don't think it's going to be done before 2040.