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I have to say I'm kind of baffled about all these companies complaining "Regulation is hurting self driving cars!" and "Regulation is hurting drone delivery!" w
by drcode 11y ago
I have to say I'm kind of baffled about all these companies complaining "Regulation is hurting self driving cars!" and "Regulation is hurting drone delivery!" when there are pretty much zero barriers to enter the consumer robotics market for a machine that dusts your house, does your laundry, does your dishes, picks up clutter from the floor, etc.
(And yes I realize these tasks involve surprisingly hard AI problems, but why isn't Google already running pilots where they give people special washing machines, laundry machines, robot-friendly book shelves, etc etc that help mitigate the hard AI aspects of the problem?)
- bliti 11y agoSimple: they lack leadership. A proper leader would focus on setting the framework for autonomous machines to operate. Without leadership, all they can do is showcase shiny greenfield projects.
- pj_mukh 11y agoThe same reason they haven't given everybody "pilot" autonomous cars. Expectations are huge now, everything must be perfect.
- mrfusion 11y agoI agree. What about a robot that simply move clothes from the washer to the dryer? That's a pretty well defined tasks and is basically 50% of the work of doing laundry.
- melling 11y agoSomeone else fold your close for you? Moving the clothes from the washer to dryer takes 15 seconds.
- tamana 11y agoYou have to be there to do it, which interrupts whatever you were doing at an annoyingly pecise time.
- melling 11y agoClothes can sit in the washer for hours. :-) I transfer when I'm walking by to go to the bathroom. Actually, with my AppleWatch, I usually unload dishwasher, washer/dryer when I'm told to stand up and move for a minute.
- mrfusion 11y agoI actually have a superpower where I can smell mildew when no one else can. So even 30 minutes of leaving the clothes wet is too much for me. It's interesting when I meet people I can smell who has left their clothes in the washer too long.
- mrfusion 11y agoI live out of the dryer :-(
- ghaff 11y agoAll-in-one units exist that just have a single front-loading tub. It seems they're designed primarily for where space is tight, so I suspect there are some tradeoffs. But as someone else said, that's probably the step associated with doing laundry that's the least effort. Putting clothes away is the biggest effort and good luck designing a robot to handle that.
- michaelt 11y agoIn 'serious academic' robotics, if you only have one hokuyo urg lidar [1] and one xsens mems imu [2] you're on a low budget project and you'll probably need a bunch more sensors before your product can operate reliably unattended. But you've already spent ten times the cost of an entry level roomba. The kind of butler robot we can make today [3] would seem extremely expensive for the functionality it could offer, making it hard get the sales needed to recoup your up front engineering costs - let alone to achieve the economies of scale needed to bring down the price on those sensors. [1] http://www.robotshop.com/en/hokuyo-urg-04lx-ug01-scanning-laser-rangefinder.html http://www.robotshop.com/en/hokuyo-urg-04lx-ug01-scanning-la... [2] http://www.newark.com/xsens/mti-20-2a5g4/mems-module-3d-motion-tracker/dp/94X2368 http://www.newark.com/xsens/mti-20-2a5g4/mems-module-3d-moti... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODGHw8uNnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODGHw8uNnY
- yincrash 11y agoI misread that as 'butter robot'. https://youtu.be/8d_hveJL4mU https://youtu.be/8d_hveJL4mU
- Tempest1981 11y agoThanks for the links; I love this stuff. I can see the laser rangefinder [1] being expensive. But what makes the xsens gyro/accelerometer [2] so expensive compared to a smartphone sensor, and why does a robot need that?
- sean-duffy 11y agoYeah that thing seems way overpriced, or at least far too high-spec for most applications. Quadcopter flight control boards containing gyros and accelerometers can be had for less than $20, and those do just fine.
- Animats 11y agoAccurate heading info requires good gyros and is moderately expensive. It's a lot cheaper than it used to be. When we did our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle ten years ago, we had about 3 degrees of heading noise, which kept the system which integrated LIDAR data into a terrain map from reliably mapping. The system had a MEMS gyro with too high a drift rate, and a magnetometer compass for long-term correction. But there were enough magnetic fields from the onboard equipment to mess up the magnetic compass. The software could detect trouble, and would stop, tilt the laser head to scan the terrain ahead and get a clean image, then advance. So the vehicle kept stopping to rescan. We looked into better heading gyros, but they cost about $20K at the time.
- icebraining 11y agoIf you need expensive sensors and other parts, the unit economics for domestic robots don't make sense; a single robot would cost too much for any single family to justify, compared to just hiring someone to do the laundry once or twice a week. A delivery drone, on the other hand, would be used all day by some business, so a large upfront investment makes sense.
- dominotw 11y agoI am reading this while my neato robot is disoriented trying to find its home base and is bumping into every wall on the way. I basically have zero confidence that we'll see something like what you are describing in next 2 decades atleast.
- Symmetry 11y agoReally regulation is critical for the success of self-driving cars. Nobody is going to want to buy self-driving cars if there are ones that get into lots of crashes so I think we're going to get into the same situation we have with the FAA where the big players all want the regulator to have real teeth. Consumer robotics doesn't have much of an entry barrier but as other have pointed out the components you need mean that prices are going to be in the $X0,000 range. That's too much for consumers but I think we're going to be seeing robots in warehouses soon.
- danblick 11y ago"Really regulation is critical for the success of self-driving cars. Nobody is going to want to buy self-driving cars if there are ones that get into lots of crashes..." If I were a car manufacturer and nobody wanted to buy my cars because they were seen as dangerous, I might try to make my cars safer to increase my sales, even if the law didn't require it.
- rhino369 11y agoThe problem is trust. The car being safe and being marketed as safe are different.
- jblow 11y agoYou might, but that costs money, and other market players are always invented to undercut you. Because the line of how much is too much is indistinct, someone is going to guess wrong before too long. This is even before you mix in perverse organizational incentives involving short-term view or individual profit vs long-term company health.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoComplaining about regulations holding you back is a great way to hide that your technology isn't actually there yet. It's marketing.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoCompanies always love to complain about too much regulation tho.