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Having worked on home robotics (in university, for RoboCup@Home so nothing commercial), home robots now finally feel really feasible. The breakthroughs from LLM

Having worked on home robotics (in university, for RoboCup@Home so nothing commercial), home robots now finally feel really feasible. The breakthroughs from LLMs and other ML technologies could finally bring this dream to reality. I'd gladly pay 10k for a robot to do all the chores at home.

genmon 2y ago
My take is that this is an opportunity to re-think what chores are, and what white goods are for Like -- let's say you rent (as we all do, increasingly). Instead of buying different special purpose kitchen gadgets, white goods, and cleaning equipment to haul around with you, why not a general purpose robot that does the easy 80% of all chores?
- modeless 2y ago
  Yes, it's an opportunity to simplify the home. You don't need labor saving devices if you don't need to save labor.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Hmm… like how smartphones replaced the stereo (badly, but still), Walkman, tape recorder, radio, camera, telephone, etc.
- ragebol 2y ago
  You're saying: why buy a dishwasher and a washing machine and a dryer and a vacuum robot etc if you could buy a home robot to do all of those chores by robot-hand?
  - Filligree 2y ago
    The answer is going to be energy efficiency. Your dishwasher uses dramatically less power and water than you would use, if washing them by hand.
    - ragebol 2y ago
      Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure most people only care about money efficiency: what choice is cheaper, now and over time.
      - Filligree 2y ago
        That’ll still be the dishwasher, then.
    - Semaphor 2y ago
      > Your dishwasher uses dramatically less power and water than you would use, if washing them by hand. Only if used optimally, or the handwashing is very wasteful. There is one study I know of, it was paid for by washing machine manufacturers and has quite a few issues (like not removing outliers). And yes, I measured my usage of water and power. (I’d still get a dishwasher if my kitchen had space for it)
falcor84 2y ago
I think 10k will be out of reach for awhile, but I think we'll start seeing humanoid home robots for ~100k in the next few years. I also think we'll probably see more subscription/leasing of such robots rather than outright ownership.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Why do people jump all the way to humanoid? That little box with an arm on it would not cost more than 10k, and I'd gladly take one for upstairs and one for downstairs WAY BEFORE I'd buy a 100kg walking steel frame to coexist with my toddlers.
  - falcor84 2y ago
    The reason I jumped to humanoids is that I think that the fact that they'll be able to learn tasks by imitating us will make them a lot more versatile and cost-effective overall.
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      Isn’t current training paradigms requiring massive amounts of data? You aren’t going to get that easily from a handful of luxury robots.
      - corysama 2y ago
        Check out https://www.1x.tech/androids/neo https://www.1x.tech/androids/neo Their plan is to put droids in real homes and remote control them to create the kinds of training data that can’t be faked in a lab. They explain how that works here https://youtu.be/2ccPTpDq05A https://youtu.be/2ccPTpDq05A
      - falcor84 2y ago
        Why handful? I would assume that domestic robots like that would sell at least as many units as luxury cars - hundreds of thousands a year. In terms of training, there are a lot of current approaches of learning from videos (of which we have a lot) and from synthetic data, which is getting easier to generate. And if they need more data, I would assume that offering a version of such a robot with telemetry at a large discount would be an easy sell for some. In particular, I'd expect there would be a lot of demand for assistants to elderly people.

genmon 2y ago

My take is that this is an opportunity to re-think what chores are, and what white goods are for Like -- let's say you rent (as we all do, increasingly). Instead of buying different special purpose kitchen gadgets, white goods, and cleaning equipment to haul around with you, why not a general purpose robot that does the easy 80% of all chores?

modeless 2y ago
Yes, it's an opportunity to simplify the home. You don't need labor saving devices if you don't need to save labor.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Hmm… like how smartphones replaced the stereo (badly, but still), Walkman, tape recorder, radio, camera, telephone, etc.
ragebol 2y ago
You're saying: why buy a dishwasher and a washing machine and a dryer and a vacuum robot etc if you could buy a home robot to do all of those chores by robot-hand?
- Filligree 2y ago
  The answer is going to be energy efficiency. Your dishwasher uses dramatically less power and water than you would use, if washing them by hand.
  - ragebol 2y ago
    Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure most people only care about money efficiency: what choice is cheaper, now and over time.
    - Filligree 2y ago
      That’ll still be the dishwasher, then.
  - Semaphor 2y ago
    > Your dishwasher uses dramatically less power and water than you would use, if washing them by hand. Only if used optimally, or the handwashing is very wasteful. There is one study I know of, it was paid for by washing machine manufacturers and has quite a few issues (like not removing outliers). And yes, I measured my usage of water and power. (I’d still get a dishwasher if my kitchen had space for it)

falcor84 2y ago

I think 10k will be out of reach for awhile, but I think we'll start seeing humanoid home robots for ~100k in the next few years. I also think we'll probably see more subscription/leasing of such robots rather than outright ownership.

jvanderbot 2y ago
Why do people jump all the way to humanoid? That little box with an arm on it would not cost more than 10k, and I'd gladly take one for upstairs and one for downstairs WAY BEFORE I'd buy a 100kg walking steel frame to coexist with my toddlers.
- falcor84 2y ago
  The reason I jumped to humanoids is that I think that the fact that they'll be able to learn tasks by imitating us will make them a lot more versatile and cost-effective overall.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Isn’t current training paradigms requiring massive amounts of data? You aren’t going to get that easily from a handful of luxury robots.
    - corysama 2y ago
      Check out https://www.1x.tech/androids/neo https://www.1x.tech/androids/neo Their plan is to put droids in real homes and remote control them to create the kinds of training data that can’t be faked in a lab. They explain how that works here https://youtu.be/2ccPTpDq05A https://youtu.be/2ccPTpDq05A
    - falcor84 2y ago
      Why handful? I would assume that domestic robots like that would sell at least as many units as luxury cars - hundreds of thousands a year. In terms of training, there are a lot of current approaches of learning from videos (of which we have a lot) and from synthetic data, which is getting easier to generate. And if they need more data, I would assume that offering a version of such a robot with telemetry at a large discount would be an easy sell for some. In particular, I'd expect there would be a lot of demand for assistants to elderly people.