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"Overselling is a dangerous strategy that can be counterproductive, even for the whole robotics community. Both companies and researchers publish videos of robots doing tasks, but sometimes they fail to point out the limitations of the technology or that those results were achieved in lab conditions. This makes it much more difficult to explain to non-roboticist industry executives the difference between creating a one-off demo and creating a real product that works reliably."

This makes me think of automobiles - cars were first seen as "a rich man's toy", but Henry Ford worked hard to change that perception. He said cars are for anyone. They can be used to go to work, to visit family, to go sightseeing.

I still don't see basic needs like that being addressed with robotics. For instance, is it going to take out the trash? Clean the toilets? Fix the plumbing?

11 comments

The most numerous robot in the world is a vacuum cleaner. Autonomous cars are seeing huge investment.

Basic needs are gradually being addressed, but it’s true that you don’t see it. As soon as something robotic works, people forget about it, and this is how it should be.

Relevant comic: http://www.artificial-intelligence.com/comic/7

But give it a humanoid form, a menacing mechanical voice, a bad attitude, and a zap gun, and the skepticism is much reduced!

Yup. For example, GPT-2, a new machine learning program that can reliably produce realistic middle-school-C-student-level text based on minimal prompts, has faced similar criticism: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-g...

Quote:

> A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:

>> I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.

> I resisted the urge to answer “Yeah, well, your mom is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.”

> But I think it would have been true.

The better we get at AI, the more we understand how AI works, and the more we can say, "that's not AI, that's just an algorithm that does <insert explanation of how the algorithm works>". OK, but there has to be some mechanism to how our brains work, right? How do we know we aren't just implementing shitty approximations of that mechanism?

Do you refer to roombas or the classic upright vacuum? Because it's hard to consider the latter anything other than a machine or appliance. It has one button, one function, two states, and is controlled by a human.

Roombas. Millions have been sold, plus millions of third party clones.

RoboCup@Home [0] is addressing such home tasks, eg. cleaning a toilet, in a competition setting for universities. This is an attempt by last year's winners: [1]. Taking out trash is a new assignment this year.

Note that in RoboCup@Home, the robot have to do a LOT of things well and its easy to be spread too thin over all those capabilities, whereas the Amazon Picking Challenge has a very narrow focus and you can still modify your environment a bit.

[0] https://github.com/RoboCupAtHome/RuleBook [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx3QdaPD8bw

That's quite interesting, I like it - I wonder if they have plans to shrink that down over time?

Shrink what down?

The robot. Would be interesting if the robot gets to a point where it's useful, reliable, and versatile for the home and its "owner". I wonder if this will spawn new economies as it did for automobiles?

Not sure how much you can scale down. To reach high enough to be useful, you'll need some base and proper arm to achieve that.

Yeah, once we have a more general-purpose robot that can fold your clothes, set your table, cook breakfast, and load/unload your dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer (or at least handle a reasonable subset of those tasks) we might finally start to see some progress in this area.

Those are enormously complicated tasks to solve in the general case though, so I don't anticipate anything like that being available for quite some time.

> we might finally start to see some progress in this area.

You just ignored that the washing machine itself is a special purpose robot. Same with the dishwasher. Some progress already happened.

Go back a generation or two in the US, or live like the majority of people in the world, and you'd notice that laundry and dishes are very usefully semi-automated today.

They aren't robots because they aren't cybernetic at all. Sensory input and response loops are at the core of what a robot is, not automating things.

They have feedback loops. Temperature, time and speed control.

It's an automated, feedback controlled, electro-mechanical labour saving home appliance. It doesn't matter if you call it a robot or not: progress has been made.

Even one of those tasks would probably be enough for people to consider adopting robots. People started to have telephones back when you could only do voice calls with them. Then, the tasks that mobile phones could do expanded, first to PDAs then to the iPhone in the smartphone age.

What I would pay for a clothes-folding robot. That is my least-liked chore, folding the same clothes in the same way every week. Yes I wear the same clothes every week - I'm an engineer.

> fold your clothes, set your table, cook breakfast, and load/unload your dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer

But are these pain points for a sufficient number of people? I can understand robots that could do these tasks would be a godsend for disabled people and the very elderly, but those are small markets. The vast majority of able bodied people just fold their own clothes and do their own laundry. It’s easy and takes minutes. I don’t think I’d even pay $100 for a robot that could fold clothes.

There are a bunch of laundry startups:

* https://www.rinse.com/

* https://cleanly.com/

* http://www.washclubnyc.com/

These startups employ people to do the laundry of their customers. If they get big enough, those startups might invest into automation.

Your dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, etc. is sitting around most of the day being idle, with its utilization being really low. Industrial laundry robots don't need to be mass produced in order to be profitable, they can be hand manufactured. This allows lower capital expenditures and allows for faster iteration. And you could pay some person to watch 5 robots and correct them when they do something wrong, something similar isn't possible outside of the industrial setting. So those services will greatly help with the invention of automatic laundry robots I think.

I feel like it was a disappointment that some of the brightest engineers of a generation went into ad tech, and next they're going into how to make the masses into part time servants with even fewer benefits than full time low-wage employees.

Most ad tech companies (Google, FB) likely devote well under 10% of their engineering might to work directly related to the advertising that forms their revenue stream.

Newspapers and magazines are ad-funded, too, but few would consider the work of journalists to be wasteful.

Laundry is absolutely the biggest "housekeeping" item I have trouble with. I would pay a lot of money (thousands of dollars) for a robot that would take dirty laundry and wash, dry, and fold.

Can't you pay a human to do that, if you're willing to pay thousands to have it done for you?

Yes, I suppose I could. I guess that I don't want another human coming into my house in my absence to do that, nor do I want to have to schedule it to happen when I'm home. Nor do I want to take my laundry someplace else and have to return later to pick it up.

I could probably live with leaving the laundry on the porch and having it returned there. I'll have to look into whether such a service is available in my area.

I’d pay a similar amount just for folding —- especially with a kid or two and two working parents, it’s our biggest household time-suck.

People will pay for convenience. These might not be particularly difficult or time consuming tasks, but they're also rather menial, and inconvenient to have to deal with.

Just look at how much money people will pay to avoid the inconvenience of having to physically plug in their phones to charge them, for example: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=QI+Charger

If you look at videos of factories in poor countries that make textiles, trinkets, and other low-margin goods it is extremely labor intensive because labor is so cheap. Eventually, as the world continues to be lifted out of poverty, robots will be cheaper than labor. But they aren't cost effective for many tasks right now.

There's another advantage for which human workers that don't get nearly enough much credit: flexibility.

When Tesla tried to create the world's most automated assembly line for the Model 3, they learned the hard way why Toyota and others have abandoned the idea: complex automated systems are, perhaps necessarily, tightly coupled and complicated. For Tesla, this led to cascading errors and insurmountable "debugging" challenges. Eventually it became evident to Tesla and Musk that, even at first-world prices, human workers were the better buy. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/musk-tips...]

When you think about it, the work involved in building software systems may only be economically justifiable right now because computers can perform certain tasks many orders of magnitude more efficiently than humans can. In the physical realm, the differences shrink tremendously (or even reverse), making it far more difficult to compete with human workers.

On a trip to India I went to a Zoo where I took a bus to tour the enclosures for the tigers, lions, and bears. Between each species there were a set of gates to make sure the animals didn't mix. There were people who operated the gates rather than having an automated system that did the same thing.

To your point, in India it is cheaper to have a human being do that work than a machine, much less a robot. It will take a long time for the economics of robots to catch up on really cheap labor in the developing world.

Yes, exactly. Every robot from these companies I'd seen were underwhelming and nothing I would have spent money on. A robot that could do my laundry I'd pay $2000 for.

One data point: in NYC, wash and fold laundry service costs me ~$15 every 2 weeks. It would take 5 years (133 loads) for the robot to break-even and that's not counting soap or the time-value of money. Granted my clothes are relatively simple and non-delicate, but if the robot must handle delicates it will likely increase the costs as well.

The number one blind-spot for robotics projects is ignoring the availability of cheap (and often illegal) immigrant labor in most major locales. Western programmers think of most physical labor as abhorrent but working in a laundry in Western countries is often much better paid and comfortable than the alternatives back home. Plus your children typically have access to much higher education and opportunities.

A 5 year ROI isn't fatal. When people buy cars rather than taking taxis, the ROI is > 5 years. Many emerging technologies (solar panels, electric cars) start gaining market share when the ROI is in the 20-30 year range.

We'd have to define success. The adoption rate for washer/dryer's is what a VC would want to see and solar panels are nowhere near that.

Yeah, that's been my observation too. I used to live in NYC and felt that. I empathize. Then I moved to Cambridge, UK, for some time and was surprised at how much dry cleaning would cost; it was quite expensive so I cut down on that.

With respect to labor, I also think robotics needs to consider humans as a variable in the equation, especially if they want to compete on a task that it's easy to substitute. This gets into politics, too, and it's a question worth thinking about. I wonder: as generations change, now that we're going from Baby Boomers to Millennials to Gen Z, how will this impact views and policies?

That's both a relatively cheap price tag for a robot and a famously hard problem in robotics. You're in luck though, foldimate is aiming to launch this year for $1k. Given that a washer/dryer combo can be purchased separately for ~$1k, all you'd need to do is load each machine. Ain't the future cool?

I looked at this because we've mostly given up folding clothes with our 3 kids. I watched a video of that machine and it seems to be more for people who hate the act of folding clothes instead of people who don't have the time to fold clothes.

In comparison, our Roomba is a time saver because it means we don't have to do anything at all to vacuum every day.

Yeah, the fact that you can't just dump a pile of cloths into the machine and get neatly folded stacks out the bottom makes it far less useful IMO. Still might save _some_ time, but not nearly as much as you might expect.

That's because it's fantastically difficult to manipulate soft, flexible fabrics. Building a [plausibly person-sized] robot that can reliably manage the entire laundry cycle end-to-end is hard to imagine doing on current tech no matter how much money you have. We're only going to see these sort of semi-partial solutions for a long time to come.

Foldimate does look promising, but in the videos it looks like you have to stand their and manually feed in which seems kind of time consuming.

I wo der why didn't they invent another robot for that job and sell as an addon...

As would I, but I don't think anyone could make one that cheaply right now. I thinking of automatic milking machines for cows. Those things cost $180k each (which is why so few dairymen have them). I can't imaging a laundry machine for less than $20k right now...probably much worse.

Home robots have been a dream since the robot fad of the 80’s. We’re not really any closer and a Roomba still gets lost in a living room.

I suspect that fixing the plumbing will require human-level intelligence. There’s a lot troubleshooting, strategizing, trial and error, trying to pinpoint problems in somebody else’s (undocumented) design etc. It’s basically like coding.

There are plenty of kitchen machines offering to save a lot of time(instant pot, foodie ninja, tovala oven and others), both at the home and at restaurants(see spyce).

They do their job pretty well. maybe not 100% but close enough.

Same with laundry, roombas, yard work, etc.

So now a robot gets all the simple jobs taken away from him, and is left with relatively little work to do. And this process will continue.

So maybe, in this environment, we'll never see a generic house robot?

Makes me think of electric cars. Just a few edits: "Electric cars were first seen as a Maker project or "a rich man's toy", but Elon Musk worked hard to change that perception. He said electric cars are for anyone. They can be used to go to work, to visit family, to go sightseeing."

Given that they're being built with autonomy in mind, wouldn't they qualify as robots owned by regular people?

I concur. Is iRobot considered an unsuccessful company? The basic premise of the article is if these organizations are being consumer focused.

basic needs are addressed by robots, they are just specialized ones called machines. I have robots in my house to wash and dry my clothes and my dishes! It is wonderful not to have to do these chores manually.

I still have to unload/load my dishwasher manually. Same goes for gathering, loading, unloading, folding and putting away laundry.

Whoever develops a robot (or robots) that can perform those tasks is going to be very rich.