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Full dosclosure: I am a roboticist. I've been in the field professionally for about thirty years. I'm really skeptical that there is anything “after the roomba

Full dosclosure: I am a roboticist. I've been in the field professionally for about thirty years. I'm really skeptical that there is anything “after the roomba”. Or, to be more specific, I'm skeptical that technology used in the home will look anything like a robot, a self-contained intelligent machine that moves around and cleans/folds laundry/does dishes. Ther are a couple of reasons for this. This first is that these problems are extremely hard to solve. And this is not true just in terms of algorithms, but also in terms of hardware. A humanoid robot is as complex as, if not more complex than, an automobile. Currently, humanoid robots go for $500,000 a pop. Even after economies of scale it's hard for me to imagine that getting below $50,000 — much less $5,000, which is probably the price range that makes them viable as anything other than a novelty for wealthy people. Which brings up the second point. One thing I have learned the hard way in robotics is that you have to understand precisely what your competition is and how much money that competition requires to solve the problem. In the case of an in-home robot, for most of us the competition is our own labor or that of our significant others/kids/housemates. But we are not the early adopters of this technology. Wealthy people are. For wealthy people, the competition is either a live-in assistant or a contract cleaning service. Contract cleaning services pay their workers approximately minimum wage. Minimum wage is a very difficult price target for a robot to meet. And the third issue is that to first approximation these problems are already solved. And not by what we would consider a robot, but by appliances. My grandmother, for most of her life, kept house without elecricity, and hence without a dishwasher, vacuum, or dryer. These appliances dramatically reduced the effort it takes to keep house, without being robots. I strongly suspect that any cost-efficient solution to folding clothes or taking dirty dishes from the sink and turning them into clean dishes in a cupboard will resemble an appliance. If you want your dishes cleaned robotically, then you don't put a robot in the kitchen. You turn the kitchen into a robot.

russdill 8y ago
What if I told you that these robots were assembled almost entirely by other robots? And that their raw materials were mined by other robots?
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  My first response would be that prices will always equilibrate such that complicated machines are always expensive relative to income. Except for microprocessors. But microprocessors are deeply weird, economically.
  - pickdenis 8y ago
    Nanotechnology must be the answer, then.
  - rusticpenn 8y ago
    The foundries operate at very low margins, They need atleast 5 years to get the money back. I think it was a race to lower costs as there is no significant change in quality of chips between taiwanese foundaries or former german foundaries.
- chki 8y ago
  What does that mean though? Are you suggesting that there are other problems that are already done by robots which in consequence means that these concrete tasks will also be done by robots at some point? How does that have anything to do with the concrete arguments that the parent comment is talking about?
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  So what? The FANUC robotics factory is a completely automated lights out factory, yet even a half meter arm that can brealy lift more than 10kg goes for 20-30k. Robots are just expensive.
  - iandanforth 8y ago
    False! Robots are expensive for three reasons 1. Small scale 2. High precision and 3. Patents. By far the largest one of those is scale. If you can build a car for 15k you can build a humanoid robot for 15k. I'm happy to take a long bet on this.
nielsole 8y ago
If a robot were to do the entire household, I think people would be willing to pay north of 2k per year for that. If you spend an hour a day doing laundry, cleaning dishes, emptying the washing machine, that's 365*8.5= 3k I don't think humanoid is a viable form factor. A mobile robotic arm is easier to build and has similar benefits. It has the benefit, that we already build plenty of them and they have proven their usability in industrial settings. Now we"just" need the brains to run one of these in the kitchen
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  Robots in industrial settings don't need anything like the capability (sensing, dexterity, etc.) that a useful household robot would need. And they need to be far more safe than an industrial robot, without the safety caging that industry relies on. The problem is at least an order of magnitude more difficult. It's harder than autonomous driving, both algorithmically and in terms of hardware.
  - nielsole 8y ago
    There are already robotic arms without cages e.g. https://www.universal-robots.com/products/ur5-robot/ https://www.universal-robots.com/products/ur5-robot/ Yes, we currently don't have the technology, but nailing one or two use cases in a couple of years(e.g. being able to pick up and collect clothes onto a pile, maybe even emptying the dishwasher) may be enough for initial deployment. Also since you can make the hardware quite safe, you can have faster Software Innovation than in cars
    - ghaff 8y ago
      >being able to pick up and collect clothes onto a pile This is pretty much a textbook example of something that would be both very difficult for a robot and an almost trivial task for a human. A washer/dryer already does about 95% of the work of doing laundry. (Less, admittedly, if you iron but then that's another task. And one I assume there is machinery but just not worthwhile at home scale.) And, of course, there's always the option of taking your laundry into somewhere to have it done for you. There have been efforts at services that pickup to do this sort of thing but most people aren't willing to pay for it.
btbuildem 8y ago
I think the cost problem can at least partially be solved by taking the "sharing economy" approach. Eg, you don't own the robot, you rent it.
- aqme28 8y ago
  It still has to compete with minimum wage. Even at 100% utilization, that robot can't be $500,000
  - traviscj 8y ago
    It doesn’t have to pay for itself every year, which helps. (Still too much though, maybe...)
notatoad 8y ago
A friend's family "solved" the problem of cleaning dishes and putting them in the cupboard by having two diswashers, a magnet that said "clean", and a magnet that said "dirty".
- j2bax 8y ago
  So they just eliminated the cupboard? They must not have a whole lot of dishes!
  - Elv13 8y ago
    Looking at the existence of caches in our CPUs and computers (and all CDNs), I conclude that the 80/20 rule apply to dish washing! (/s) But really, it might just be that people use 20% of their dish-washable objects 80% of the time. So having 2 dish washers eliminate 80% of the labor of putting them in the cupboard because 80% will be gone in the other machine by the time you really have to fill the cupboards. Then again, that's lazyness and I suspect the higher humidity of the dishwasher is an health issue.
  - seppel 8y ago
    No, in fact they had two self-cleaning cupboards.
    - alelefant 8y ago
      That seems like a fire hazard.
      - village-idiot 8y ago
        It’s literally full of water.
        alelefant 8y ago
        It was a joke.
  - 8y ago
WhompingWindows 8y ago
For me the robot vacuum was just a fun way to vacuum. I wasn't making any grand calculation of competition or value added, I just thought it'd be fun to have a robot. Also, I'm skeptical of humanoid robots because companies can just pay actual humans dirt wages and get away with it in most countries.
SilasX 8y ago
You wouldn’t have to buy a humanoid robot; you could rent it, and given the typical rental factor, the monthly price wouldn’t be far off that off in-home domestic labor. Less when you account for labor law compliance.
bitL 8y ago
Hmm, this makes me think there will be first sex bots that will get some extra new useful function for household in each iteration... VHS story all over again, pushing for economies of scale.
- hnzix 8y ago
  I mean, pornhub have created "The Twerkin Butt", a crude sexbot paired with VR glasses.
flukus 8y ago
> I'm really skeptical that there is anything “after the roomba”. Or, to be more specific, I'm skeptical that technology used in the home will look anything like a robot, a self-contained intelligent machine that moves around and cleans/folds laundry/does dishes. I think your right there. Personally I don't even have room for a humanoid robot, it'd be getting in my way constantly. What I would like to see is something more along the lines of a series of those programmable industrial robotic arms extending from my ceiling. That's something that could fetch me a beer from the fridge, take my empty plate to the sink and move my dirty clothes to the laundry, all without getting in my way. That would be a good base to start expanding functionality on.
- jpm_sd 8y ago
  These tasks are not real problems in need of solutions. Fetching a beer from the fridge, taking an empty plate to the sink, and throwing dirty clothes in a hamper take so little time that there is no reason to automate them.
  - flukus 8y ago
    Those are mostly examples, a machine capable of doing that would be capable of much more. If it can move clothes around it can probably work the washing machine, move the washing to the drier and hang up the dry clothes. If it can fetch a beer it can put the shopping away and maybe give a stir to whatever I'm simmering on the stove top. It could possibly vacuum better than a roomba. Also for some things like the clothes hamper example, it's not a matter of saving much time but actually doing it where a lazy human (me) would just leave it.
darawk 8y ago
> her are a couple of reasons for this. This first is that these problems are extremely hard to solve. And this is not true just in terms of algorithms, but also in terms of hardware. A humanoid robot is as complex as, if not more complex than, an automobile. Currently, humanoid robots go for $500,000 a pop. Even after economies of scale it's hard for me to imagine that getting below $50,000 — much less $5,000, which is probably the price range that makes them viable as anything other than a novelty for wealthy people. I'm curious why you think that is the case? What is so expensive about humanoid robots? I don't disagree with you, I have no knowledge on the matter, i'm just curious as it doesn't comport with my intuition.
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  Humanoids, in particular, have a lot of moving parts. The human arm has 7 degrees of freedom. The hand has something like 21. Legs, 7. Feet, somewhere between 3 and six. That's a lot of motors, gears, motor controller boards, joint angle sensors, force-torque sensors, etc. Humans have ubiquitous sensing. Tactile sensing of up to 1000 sensors per square inch of skin. Force sensing at every joint. High bandwidth, highly efficient actuators (muscles). Humanoids are just extremely complicated systems with a lot of moving parts that require very high reliability, along with a metric ton of sensors and the wiring harness needed to support all of it. For reference, a standard brushless DC motor that is reliable enough, strong enough, and precise enough for use in a robot will retail for around $1000. Just for the motor. And you need at least 30 of them, probably more.
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    Not to mention that humans run on food, produce little waste heat, are portable, and regenerate many tissues as needed for decades until we enter EOL.
  - rasz 8y ago
    its 100% in R&D. Real commodity hardware is sold at ~3x raw material cost, with R&D amortized over millions of units and very long period. Every time you see something made in china and go "how the hell can this be so cheap" is seeing real commodity price, with no R&D and middleman margins. People will argue about quality, by writing replies on keyboards that cost $5 to make in China, and clicking send with $0.2 BoYue microswitch in their $70(retail) mouse. You could in theory make 500K robots at 5K if you give up any notion of recouping development cost by tackling ridiculous margins, and instead concentrate on moving millions of units.
totalZero 8y ago
1. You are imagining current technologies at scale, but future technologies are likely to get cheaper and better. Robotics is still a newborn field. Cars have also gotten cheaper and better; the Model T started out around 20k in today's dollars for a 20hp car that went 45mph. 2. You're comparing an in-home robot to a contract cleaner. Robots would be cheaper for the customer on a contract basis, just as a live-in maid costs more than a contract cleaning service. I do agree that the Jetsons-esque conception of a humanoid service robot is not how things will likely shake out as domestic robotics matures; IMO the humanoid is a simplistic image that demonstrates a lack of imagination.
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  Sure. Forever is a long time. But don't confuse hardware with microprocessors. There aren't many fields, maybe not any, whee you see exponential growth in capability and exponential improvement in price sustained over decades. Cars may be a good model here. But I would argue that current generation robots aren't Model T's. 1960'-era industrial robots were the Model T. Current generation KUKA's are 1950's Cadillacs. Cars of today aren't exponentially better than a 1955 Caddy. The period of rapid growth in robotics (on the hardware side) started a while ago, and it's probably approximately linear. Robonaut is the Lunar Rover. It's awesome, but it isn't at all clear whether any of that tech addresses a commercial market.
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    There aren't many fields, maybe not any, whee you see exponential growth in capability and exponential improvement in price sustained over decades. Obviously, the field where exponential growth is/was sustained over a significant period is chips/microprocessors. Miniaturization is well-know as the key to this. Information processing so-far is all that has benefited here. But existence of biological organisms, constructed from cells existing on a tiny scale, shows that miniaturization could be applied to other functionalities. There's no reason to think we're near that now but the situation does invite us to imagine it in theory.
    - 8y ago
shostack 8y ago
One "cleaning" task that I think is often overlooked is basic organization of small clutter and such. It takes up tons of spaces, is often poorly organized, and finding things you lost is a huge headache. I'd love to see some sort of out of the way storage system with an in-home Kiva style robot that lets you select what you want in an app, and it goes and fetches it. When you want to put something away, the robot shows up, collects your item, and stores it. To be truly useful, you'd probably need a somewhat decent sized storage area, and the robot may need to be decent sized depending on the weight and size of objects to be handled.
- dorkusmagnus 8y ago
  I suffer the same issue. I think I'm just gonna buy cubbies soon. Clear Hanging shoe racks have helped a ton as well as large Ziploc type bags.
woodpanel 8y ago
> you don't put a robot in the kitchen. You turn the kitchen into a robot. That was my thinking too after reading the article. Why jump through all those hoops, trying to get a robot mimicking us getting around the house and instead just build smarter, more capable appliances. E.g.: - having cupboards that double as dishwashers (the robot does the sorting and drying...) - having wardrobes that double as washing machines (the robot does the sorting and drying...) - having trash bins that do the seperation, maybe even compression But in any of those cases, the "robot" could be a grappler on a track that never leaves the casing of the appliance
- candiodari 8y ago
  This is exactly why robots are so expensive. Let's take a simpler example. Let's say you want sun tracking on a solar power installation. You could of course use mechanical linkages, or individual motors, or a combination. This is what's done now, and it's actually a decent part of the cost (so much it's often not done, or people do ridiculous things, like building a 10x10 meter solar panel so you only have to have one huge tracker). Think about a robot going around that can aim a single solar panel to the sun in 30 seconds. That robot can do 120 aims per hour, and can keep ~400 solar panels at 96%+ efficiency by going around constantly. A collection of such robots provides redundancy (like humans do, if you've got more than one). Such a solar tracker costs ~$200 at scale per solar panel. Mechanical solutions are cheaper up front, but you'll be fixing them weekly. So a robot that can do this can sell for ~$50000 and be profitable from day 1 (because it replaces capital expenditure). There'll be way less to fix and you can probably just take the robot back to the factory while providing a replacement onsite, which would be a fantasy with the motor based solution. Or you could have N+2 or higher redundancy for large sites and come by for robot replacements once a year providing constant coverage essentially free. The same with your kitchen. Having a general capable robot can use a lot of equipment to accomplish a great many tasks. Such a robot even means that the difference between a cheap and an expensive, say, dishwasher, disappears to an extent. The most expensive dishwasher won't match the comfort of a cheap one + a robot, and the same is true for all other appliances. Given that how much is it allowed to cost ? 5000$ seems like a lower bound. I'd be willing to pay that, which usually means others are willing to pay 100x that, even if that seems a bit much (in the West though, perhaps not as much).
modeless 8y ago
If you truly had a humanoid robot that could do the dishes and the laundry and cook and clean the house, you would have no trouble at all selling it for $50,000. It would sell like hotcakes at that price. People would use financing to buy it just like cars. A contract cleaning service is cheap, but they aren't in your home helping you 24/7. This hypothetical $50,000 robot would be much more useful and not that much more expensive if amortized over, say, 10 years with regular maintenance.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  Also, at that price, cleaning services, all sorts of industries, would buy them to replace human labour.
  - grogenaut 8y ago
    At 50k/year that's 2-3x minimum wage depending on where you live. That's 3 employees for a year. And in that wage bracket there are no repair costs associated with the humans. Nor maintenance. Also who gets the robot to the house? And what cleaning company or what ever has the Capitol for a $50k purchase. The competition has their own Transit and start up costs are cleaning supplies.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      The parent and grandparent comments to mine appear to be talking about $50,000 as the original purchase price. That’s the way I read it. If it were $50,000 per year then I agree with you.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
        Further to this, Australia, where I live, has a high minimum wage at a little over $20/hr casual, and a little under as a fall tint employee with 20 days paid leave and 10 days sick leave per year. There’s no way I can afford a full time, 8hrs / day, personal assistant.
sigi45 8y ago
I thought about it before. I'm just waiting to spend between 5-15k for a robot who cleans the kitchen and does laundry. After the autonomous car phase will become boring people will spend more in robotic.
cbames89 8y ago
You can get a spot mini for ~30k according to Raibert. I think limiting our analysis to one particular form of robot is probably not a good idea. As we're still trying to figure out which form is the best for whatever that "killer app" is in robotics. Also one reason to not turn a kitchen into a robot is generality of solution. If you can have 1 robot work in 3 kitchens is cheaper than retrofitting the 3 kitchens. All of that being said I generally agree with your sentiment, and I think we'll see robots move into places they're needed/bring more additional value than general house chores. For example, restaurants. Where they can be faster, safer with food, but still general enough to put cheese on one burger and not the next without an engineer coming in after installation.
tr33house 8y ago
Thanks for this write-up, very insightful
rstuart4133 8y ago
I think you are looking it the wrong way. It's very easy to come up with things that are not possible, but not very useful exercise. Technology evolves in the direction of what is possible and useful now. The original Roomba came into being when it was possible for something as dumb as a doormat to navigate the house. Other applications of the same algorithm are already happening - Husqvarna uses the same random walk to mow the lawn, and there are other robots that will weed the garden. I have a retired engineering mate who armed himself with 3D printer, a CAD package and an eBay account to construct his own automatic lawn mower. It doesn't use a random walk - it uses the 8mm precision of an RTK GPS to go through a planned an arbitrarily complex path. 8mm is good enough for all sorts tasks of course - like hedge trimming, cleaning outside windows and using compressed air to clean gutters. Inside the house Roomba's mates have already evolved. They now know where they are in the house, which was introduced to allow them to resume where they left off. But it has also meant they can have virtual boundaries, which means the can be told where the border between time tiles and barriste carpet is so some of them are sporting mops now. Cleaning walls, side webs of ceilings and bathrooms can't be too far away. Dusting will follow shortly thereafter. The point is these things evolve. I don't know what point you say it isn't a Roomba any more, I daresay it won't be obvious - I'm sure you will say the current lawnmowers are just Roomba's with blades. However while something that puts a wet rag on a wall won't be much smarter than today's vacuum cleaners, it won't look like a Roomba. I think the explosion week come with imaging. I don't mean image recognition - just the recognition of 3D boundaries of objects - things like walls, bench tops, obstacles on the floor, where the windows and mirrors that need to be cleaned are, where cupboard doors that can open and shut are, where dishwashers that contain round flat things like plates that always go into the same place into those cupboards are - this is how things will evolve. I agree we won't see a Boston dynamics style robot in the house time soon. What we will get will be far dumber, and far more useful.

russdill 8y ago

What if I told you that these robots were assembled almost entirely by other robots? And that their raw materials were mined by other robots?

GlenTheMachine 8y ago
My first response would be that prices will always equilibrate such that complicated machines are always expensive relative to income. Except for microprocessors. But microprocessors are deeply weird, economically.
- pickdenis 8y ago
  Nanotechnology must be the answer, then.
- rusticpenn 8y ago
  The foundries operate at very low margins, They need atleast 5 years to get the money back. I think it was a race to lower costs as there is no significant change in quality of chips between taiwanese foundaries or former german foundaries.
chki 8y ago
What does that mean though? Are you suggesting that there are other problems that are already done by robots which in consequence means that these concrete tasks will also be done by robots at some point? How does that have anything to do with the concrete arguments that the parent comment is talking about?
tomatotomato37 8y ago
So what? The FANUC robotics factory is a completely automated lights out factory, yet even a half meter arm that can brealy lift more than 10kg goes for 20-30k. Robots are just expensive.
- iandanforth 8y ago
  False! Robots are expensive for three reasons 1. Small scale 2. High precision and 3. Patents. By far the largest one of those is scale. If you can build a car for 15k you can build a humanoid robot for 15k. I'm happy to take a long bet on this.

nielsole 8y ago

If a robot were to do the entire household, I think people would be willing to pay north of 2k per year for that. If you spend an hour a day doing laundry, cleaning dishes, emptying the washing machine, that's 365*8.5= 3k I don't think humanoid is a viable form factor. A mobile robotic arm is easier to build and has similar benefits. It has the benefit, that we already build plenty of them and they have proven their usability in industrial settings. Now we"just" need the brains to run one of these in the kitchen

GlenTheMachine 8y ago
Robots in industrial settings don't need anything like the capability (sensing, dexterity, etc.) that a useful household robot would need. And they need to be far more safe than an industrial robot, without the safety caging that industry relies on. The problem is at least an order of magnitude more difficult. It's harder than autonomous driving, both algorithmically and in terms of hardware.
- nielsole 8y ago
  There are already robotic arms without cages e.g. https://www.universal-robots.com/products/ur5-robot/ https://www.universal-robots.com/products/ur5-robot/ Yes, we currently don't have the technology, but nailing one or two use cases in a couple of years(e.g. being able to pick up and collect clothes onto a pile, maybe even emptying the dishwasher) may be enough for initial deployment. Also since you can make the hardware quite safe, you can have faster Software Innovation than in cars
  - ghaff 8y ago
    >being able to pick up and collect clothes onto a pile This is pretty much a textbook example of something that would be both very difficult for a robot and an almost trivial task for a human. A washer/dryer already does about 95% of the work of doing laundry. (Less, admittedly, if you iron but then that's another task. And one I assume there is machinery but just not worthwhile at home scale.) And, of course, there's always the option of taking your laundry into somewhere to have it done for you. There have been efforts at services that pickup to do this sort of thing but most people aren't willing to pay for it.

btbuildem 8y ago

I think the cost problem can at least partially be solved by taking the "sharing economy" approach. Eg, you don't own the robot, you rent it.

aqme28 8y ago
It still has to compete with minimum wage. Even at 100% utilization, that robot can't be $500,000
- traviscj 8y ago
  It doesn’t have to pay for itself every year, which helps. (Still too much though, maybe...)

notatoad 8y ago

A friend's family "solved" the problem of cleaning dishes and putting them in the cupboard by having two diswashers, a magnet that said "clean", and a magnet that said "dirty".

j2bax 8y ago
So they just eliminated the cupboard? They must not have a whole lot of dishes!
- Elv13 8y ago
  Looking at the existence of caches in our CPUs and computers (and all CDNs), I conclude that the 80/20 rule apply to dish washing! (/s) But really, it might just be that people use 20% of their dish-washable objects 80% of the time. So having 2 dish washers eliminate 80% of the labor of putting them in the cupboard because 80% will be gone in the other machine by the time you really have to fill the cupboards. Then again, that's lazyness and I suspect the higher humidity of the dishwasher is an health issue.
- seppel 8y ago
  No, in fact they had two self-cleaning cupboards.
  - alelefant 8y ago
    That seems like a fire hazard.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      It’s literally full of water.
      - alelefant 8y ago
        It was a joke.
- 8y ago

WhompingWindows 8y ago

For me the robot vacuum was just a fun way to vacuum. I wasn't making any grand calculation of competition or value added, I just thought it'd be fun to have a robot. Also, I'm skeptical of humanoid robots because companies can just pay actual humans dirt wages and get away with it in most countries.

SilasX 8y ago

You wouldn’t have to buy a humanoid robot; you could rent it, and given the typical rental factor, the monthly price wouldn’t be far off that off in-home domestic labor. Less when you account for labor law compliance.

bitL 8y ago

Hmm, this makes me think there will be first sex bots that will get some extra new useful function for household in each iteration... VHS story all over again, pushing for economies of scale.

hnzix 8y ago
I mean, pornhub have created "The Twerkin Butt", a crude sexbot paired with VR glasses.

flukus 8y ago

> I'm really skeptical that there is anything “after the roomba”. Or, to be more specific, I'm skeptical that technology used in the home will look anything like a robot, a self-contained intelligent machine that moves around and cleans/folds laundry/does dishes. I think your right there. Personally I don't even have room for a humanoid robot, it'd be getting in my way constantly. What I would like to see is something more along the lines of a series of those programmable industrial robotic arms extending from my ceiling. That's something that could fetch me a beer from the fridge, take my empty plate to the sink and move my dirty clothes to the laundry, all without getting in my way. That would be a good base to start expanding functionality on.

jpm_sd 8y ago
These tasks are not real problems in need of solutions. Fetching a beer from the fridge, taking an empty plate to the sink, and throwing dirty clothes in a hamper take so little time that there is no reason to automate them.
- flukus 8y ago
  Those are mostly examples, a machine capable of doing that would be capable of much more. If it can move clothes around it can probably work the washing machine, move the washing to the drier and hang up the dry clothes. If it can fetch a beer it can put the shopping away and maybe give a stir to whatever I'm simmering on the stove top. It could possibly vacuum better than a roomba. Also for some things like the clothes hamper example, it's not a matter of saving much time but actually doing it where a lazy human (me) would just leave it.

darawk 8y ago

> her are a couple of reasons for this. This first is that these problems are extremely hard to solve. And this is not true just in terms of algorithms, but also in terms of hardware. A humanoid robot is as complex as, if not more complex than, an automobile. Currently, humanoid robots go for $500,000 a pop. Even after economies of scale it's hard for me to imagine that getting below $50,000 — much less $5,000, which is probably the price range that makes them viable as anything other than a novelty for wealthy people. I'm curious why you think that is the case? What is so expensive about humanoid robots? I don't disagree with you, I have no knowledge on the matter, i'm just curious as it doesn't comport with my intuition.

GlenTheMachine 8y ago
Humanoids, in particular, have a lot of moving parts. The human arm has 7 degrees of freedom. The hand has something like 21. Legs, 7. Feet, somewhere between 3 and six. That's a lot of motors, gears, motor controller boards, joint angle sensors, force-torque sensors, etc. Humans have ubiquitous sensing. Tactile sensing of up to 1000 sensors per square inch of skin. Force sensing at every joint. High bandwidth, highly efficient actuators (muscles). Humanoids are just extremely complicated systems with a lot of moving parts that require very high reliability, along with a metric ton of sensors and the wiring harness needed to support all of it. For reference, a standard brushless DC motor that is reliable enough, strong enough, and precise enough for use in a robot will retail for around $1000. Just for the motor. And you need at least 30 of them, probably more.
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  Not to mention that humans run on food, produce little waste heat, are portable, and regenerate many tissues as needed for decades until we enter EOL.
- rasz 8y ago
  its 100% in R&D. Real commodity hardware is sold at ~3x raw material cost, with R&D amortized over millions of units and very long period. Every time you see something made in china and go "how the hell can this be so cheap" is seeing real commodity price, with no R&D and middleman margins. People will argue about quality, by writing replies on keyboards that cost $5 to make in China, and clicking send with $0.2 BoYue microswitch in their $70(retail) mouse. You could in theory make 500K robots at 5K if you give up any notion of recouping development cost by tackling ridiculous margins, and instead concentrate on moving millions of units.

totalZero 8y ago

1. You are imagining current technologies at scale, but future technologies are likely to get cheaper and better. Robotics is still a newborn field. Cars have also gotten cheaper and better; the Model T started out around 20k in today's dollars for a 20hp car that went 45mph. 2. You're comparing an in-home robot to a contract cleaner. Robots would be cheaper for the customer on a contract basis, just as a live-in maid costs more than a contract cleaning service. I do agree that the Jetsons-esque conception of a humanoid service robot is not how things will likely shake out as domestic robotics matures; IMO the humanoid is a simplistic image that demonstrates a lack of imagination.

GlenTheMachine 8y ago
Sure. Forever is a long time. But don't confuse hardware with microprocessors. There aren't many fields, maybe not any, whee you see exponential growth in capability and exponential improvement in price sustained over decades. Cars may be a good model here. But I would argue that current generation robots aren't Model T's. 1960'-era industrial robots were the Model T. Current generation KUKA's are 1950's Cadillacs. Cars of today aren't exponentially better than a 1955 Caddy. The period of rapid growth in robotics (on the hardware side) started a while ago, and it's probably approximately linear. Robonaut is the Lunar Rover. It's awesome, but it isn't at all clear whether any of that tech addresses a commercial market.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  There aren't many fields, maybe not any, whee you see exponential growth in capability and exponential improvement in price sustained over decades. Obviously, the field where exponential growth is/was sustained over a significant period is chips/microprocessors. Miniaturization is well-know as the key to this. Information processing so-far is all that has benefited here. But existence of biological organisms, constructed from cells existing on a tiny scale, shows that miniaturization could be applied to other functionalities. There's no reason to think we're near that now but the situation does invite us to imagine it in theory.
  - 8y ago

shostack 8y ago

One "cleaning" task that I think is often overlooked is basic organization of small clutter and such. It takes up tons of spaces, is often poorly organized, and finding things you lost is a huge headache. I'd love to see some sort of out of the way storage system with an in-home Kiva style robot that lets you select what you want in an app, and it goes and fetches it. When you want to put something away, the robot shows up, collects your item, and stores it. To be truly useful, you'd probably need a somewhat decent sized storage area, and the robot may need to be decent sized depending on the weight and size of objects to be handled.

dorkusmagnus 8y ago
I suffer the same issue. I think I'm just gonna buy cubbies soon. Clear Hanging shoe racks have helped a ton as well as large Ziploc type bags.

woodpanel 8y ago

> you don't put a robot in the kitchen. You turn the kitchen into a robot. That was my thinking too after reading the article. Why jump through all those hoops, trying to get a robot mimicking us getting around the house and instead just build smarter, more capable appliances. E.g.: - having cupboards that double as dishwashers (the robot does the sorting and drying...) - having wardrobes that double as washing machines (the robot does the sorting and drying...) - having trash bins that do the seperation, maybe even compression But in any of those cases, the "robot" could be a grappler on a track that never leaves the casing of the appliance

candiodari 8y ago
This is exactly why robots are so expensive. Let's take a simpler example. Let's say you want sun tracking on a solar power installation. You could of course use mechanical linkages, or individual motors, or a combination. This is what's done now, and it's actually a decent part of the cost (so much it's often not done, or people do ridiculous things, like building a 10x10 meter solar panel so you only have to have one huge tracker). Think about a robot going around that can aim a single solar panel to the sun in 30 seconds. That robot can do 120 aims per hour, and can keep ~400 solar panels at 96%+ efficiency by going around constantly. A collection of such robots provides redundancy (like humans do, if you've got more than one). Such a solar tracker costs ~$200 at scale per solar panel. Mechanical solutions are cheaper up front, but you'll be fixing them weekly. So a robot that can do this can sell for ~$50000 and be profitable from day 1 (because it replaces capital expenditure). There'll be way less to fix and you can probably just take the robot back to the factory while providing a replacement onsite, which would be a fantasy with the motor based solution. Or you could have N+2 or higher redundancy for large sites and come by for robot replacements once a year providing constant coverage essentially free. The same with your kitchen. Having a general capable robot can use a lot of equipment to accomplish a great many tasks. Such a robot even means that the difference between a cheap and an expensive, say, dishwasher, disappears to an extent. The most expensive dishwasher won't match the comfort of a cheap one + a robot, and the same is true for all other appliances. Given that how much is it allowed to cost ? 5000$ seems like a lower bound. I'd be willing to pay that, which usually means others are willing to pay 100x that, even if that seems a bit much (in the West though, perhaps not as much).

modeless 8y ago

If you truly had a humanoid robot that could do the dishes and the laundry and cook and clean the house, you would have no trouble at all selling it for $50,000. It would sell like hotcakes at that price. People would use financing to buy it just like cars. A contract cleaning service is cheap, but they aren't in your home helping you 24/7. This hypothetical $50,000 robot would be much more useful and not that much more expensive if amortized over, say, 10 years with regular maintenance.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
Also, at that price, cleaning services, all sorts of industries, would buy them to replace human labour.
- grogenaut 8y ago
  At 50k/year that's 2-3x minimum wage depending on where you live. That's 3 employees for a year. And in that wage bracket there are no repair costs associated with the humans. Nor maintenance. Also who gets the robot to the house? And what cleaning company or what ever has the Capitol for a $50k purchase. The competition has their own Transit and start up costs are cleaning supplies.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    The parent and grandparent comments to mine appear to be talking about $50,000 as the original purchase price. That’s the way I read it. If it were $50,000 per year then I agree with you.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      Further to this, Australia, where I live, has a high minimum wage at a little over $20/hr casual, and a little under as a fall tint employee with 20 days paid leave and 10 days sick leave per year. There’s no way I can afford a full time, 8hrs / day, personal assistant.

sigi45 8y ago

I thought about it before. I'm just waiting to spend between 5-15k for a robot who cleans the kitchen and does laundry. After the autonomous car phase will become boring people will spend more in robotic.

cbames89 8y ago

You can get a spot mini for ~30k according to Raibert. I think limiting our analysis to one particular form of robot is probably not a good idea. As we're still trying to figure out which form is the best for whatever that "killer app" is in robotics. Also one reason to not turn a kitchen into a robot is generality of solution. If you can have 1 robot work in 3 kitchens is cheaper than retrofitting the 3 kitchens. All of that being said I generally agree with your sentiment, and I think we'll see robots move into places they're needed/bring more additional value than general house chores. For example, restaurants. Where they can be faster, safer with food, but still general enough to put cheese on one burger and not the next without an engineer coming in after installation.

tr33house 8y ago

Thanks for this write-up, very insightful

rstuart4133 8y ago

I think you are looking it the wrong way. It's very easy to come up with things that are not possible, but not very useful exercise. Technology evolves in the direction of what is possible and useful now. The original Roomba came into being when it was possible for something as dumb as a doormat to navigate the house. Other applications of the same algorithm are already happening - Husqvarna uses the same random walk to mow the lawn, and there are other robots that will weed the garden. I have a retired engineering mate who armed himself with 3D printer, a CAD package and an eBay account to construct his own automatic lawn mower. It doesn't use a random walk - it uses the 8mm precision of an RTK GPS to go through a planned an arbitrarily complex path. 8mm is good enough for all sorts tasks of course - like hedge trimming, cleaning outside windows and using compressed air to clean gutters. Inside the house Roomba's mates have already evolved. They now know where they are in the house, which was introduced to allow them to resume where they left off. But it has also meant they can have virtual boundaries, which means the can be told where the border between time tiles and barriste carpet is so some of them are sporting mops now. Cleaning walls, side webs of ceilings and bathrooms can't be too far away. Dusting will follow shortly thereafter. The point is these things evolve. I don't know what point you say it isn't a Roomba any more, I daresay it won't be obvious - I'm sure you will say the current lawnmowers are just Roomba's with blades. However while something that puts a wet rag on a wall won't be much smarter than today's vacuum cleaners, it won't look like a Roomba. I think the explosion week come with imaging. I don't mean image recognition - just the recognition of 3D boundaries of objects - things like walls, bench tops, obstacles on the floor, where the windows and mirrors that need to be cleaned are, where cupboard doors that can open and shut are, where dishwashers that contain round flat things like plates that always go into the same place into those cupboards are - this is how things will evolve. I agree we won't see a Boston dynamics style robot in the house time soon. What we will get will be far dumber, and far more useful.