I'm very skeptical of fully autonomous vehicles in the short term but I'm more optimistic for this robot. The big issues for autonomous vehicles are mainly: -

I'm very skeptical of fully autonomous vehicles in the short term but I'm more optimistic for this robot. The big issues for autonomous vehicles are mainly: - You have to deal with and anticipate the behavior of dozens of other people/animals/machines. - If you mess up you can injure or kill people. This robot doesn't really have either of these issues. You'd have to be careful around babies and very small animals, that's true, but there's still a huge potential market even if you remove small pet owners and parents of toddlers. Beyond that training the machine to identify common household items and tell it where to put them (the remote goes there, the backpack goes there, the shoes go there etc...) doesn't seem too far fetched. Being able to do the laundry (minus any ironing and assuming that you have a drying machine) also seems feasible to me. It won't be able to learn new tasks but if it's successful enough the company making them could continuously update it to implement new features, similar to how smartphone voice assistants keep improving and becoming smarter as engineers handle more corner cases. Now are these features worth the current price tag, or even half of it? Absolutely not IMO, but that's obviously only for rich early adopters at the moment. If it gains enough traction I'm sure it can improve a lot and fast while cutting the price.