3 ms·
I am fairly confident that while they're not ready "today", with the advances we're seeing in AI recently, we're going to have a viable in-home humanoid robot i
by mattlondon 1y ago
I am fairly confident that while they're not ready "today", with the advances we're seeing in AI recently, we're going to have a viable in-home humanoid robot in the next decade or two, priced at "car" kinda prices
I think this is going to be fairly transformational, at least for care scenarios.
I'm not talking about the sci-fi pipe-dream of a Star Trek Data style robot, but more like a basic humanoid robot that can reliably do mundane & basic things on-command. Like pick things up off of the floor, go fetch items from another room, open the curtains, do some basic food preparation (e.g. heat things up in a microwave levels of sophistication, or even just getting a glass of water), do the dishwasher, take out the trash and so on.
Even if it can only do 1hr of chores at a time before heading back to recharge, thats huge. It will help people live more independent lives for much longer before needing expensive care from humans (something that we have a bit of a ticking time-bomb of, at least in the UK where the population is aging rapidly). It doesn't need to be a fully fledged "robot-nurse" to be helpful.
Bonus points if it can monitor it's user(s) and call for help if there appears to be anything wrong (e.g. fallen and can't get up type monitoring), or intervene in situations before they escalate (e.g. turn the gas off if it is left on, remind to take medicines etc)
- jppope 1y agopretty sure we've already had products in the market that can do the things you are thinking of, the problem with products like baxter (or boston dynamics products) wasn't/isn't the capabilities it was/is the price point. the unit economics for robotics have always been the problem. Sure you can buy a robot for $45K but you can have a hell of a whole lot of days of cleaning with a cleaning service for that same money... the downstream effect of this is that it is very hard to get economies of scale so they never drop to the point where these things are normalized.
- mattlondon 1y agoYou can already buy one from unitree for USD16k. Full time care for the elderly is epically expensive. As the capabilities of humanoid robots grow, the demand and so the supply will increase.