181–190 of 387 posts
$20k robot -> robot app/skill store -> Killer apps??? -> More volume ->... $3k robot -> More apps/skills -> $1k robot -> Everyone has one.
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> I'd gladly pay 5k for a robot that can auto-organize my stuff around the house The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares? A good weekly cleaner (4 hours) is about €22/h in Paris, or €4.5k/year. Let’s say your robot lives 4 years, similar to your computer (which seems fair, since it is one, and an abused one at that). Since you amortize its price over 4 years, its initial cost mu…
Robots won't accidentally infect you with disease, which is a big worry these days.
Things it can't do: - go up stairs - get up after a fall / reset itself - pick up heavy objects - precise motion (so no cooking) - interact with buttons or touch screens (so laundry might be hard) The one use case I think it might be worth it is if the robot can take a room full of toys and return everything back to where it belongs. Kind of like a one click, reset this room. If it can help me keep organized and clea…
Things it can't do (extended): - operate in your particular setting (it's likely over-trained for that specific environment) - run for long periods of time as a fully autonomous robot - be anywhere near small humans or animals - do any of the tasks in the video with any kind of speed or precision - learn new tasks - handle multiple objectives, or even process the request of a single objective reliably This is nowhere…
- 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.
Things it can't do: - go up stairs - get up after a fall / reset itself - pick up heavy objects - precise motion (so no cooking) - interact with buttons or touch screens (so laundry might be hard) The one use case I think it might be worth it is if the robot can take a room full of toys and return everything back to where it belongs. Kind of like a one click, reset this room. If it can help me keep organized and clea…
Things it can do: - stick a knife in your throat while you sleep (Assuming it is always-on and connected to the internet, and has zero-day vulnerabilities which it obviously will)
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> I'd gladly pay 5k for a robot that can auto-organize my stuff around the house The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares? A good weekly cleaner (4 hours) is about €22/h in Paris, or €4.5k/year. Let’s say your robot lives 4 years, similar to your computer (which seems fair, since it is one, and an abused one at that). Since you amortize its price over 4 years, its initial cost mu…
The killer app here is tele-operated cleaning, with a monthly subscription model. I actually dont think it will replace your aforementioned 4h/week cleaner, just augment it with daily tasks. Trying to stay as ethics neutral here. We will probably see something like "Human assisted AI" with a sliding scale from mostly human to mostly AI for various tasks at various stages of development. The operators will be sourced…
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Another possible angle is integrations, i.e. robot-friendly appliances. Maybe the washing machine has a powered door and an API that the robot (or some other software) uses to control it. No need to push buttons. Obviously, this won't cover all scenarios, but as someone upthread said, to be useful it doesn't have to do everything. The bigger issue, IMO, is avoiding distasters like Roombas trying to vacuum dog poop.
This sounds like a good idea. As you said it doesn't have to cover all scenarios. I'm happy with our Roomba. We don't have any dogs but is it really that bad!? :-)
Things it can't do: - go up stairs - get up after a fall / reset itself - pick up heavy objects - precise motion (so no cooking) - interact with buttons or touch screens (so laundry might be hard) The one use case I think it might be worth it is if the robot can take a room full of toys and return everything back to where it belongs. Kind of like a one click, reset this room. If it can help me keep organized and clea…
In my country, the robot is called M.A.I.D, Mobile Autonomous Interactive Dude(tte), and it's like $5/hour.
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If you have the money, why not just hire a help? Hire your neighbour, not some billionaire. There's social ways and means for a situation like that. But oh no, having people around and paying them a decent wage smells like socialism! Anti-individualism! Better to pay 20K for a half-assed robot that can only do a fraction of what needs to be done than to pay someone's wage, right?
Call your neighbor every time you need to put some dishes in the dishwasher or do some laundry? You could have a maid but then you need to have them around all the time or you need a lot of space. Also many places in Europe it's essentially illegal to have a maid.
I'm always surprised how much these things cost. A 3 axis CNC is basically a 3 degree-of-freedom robot, yet only costs a few hundred dollars. I think we'll see mobile autonomous robots come into people's homes only after they: - fall to low thousands price range - do something useful (ie. not just a "social robot")
And there are professional CNC machine costing waay more than this robot.
I think you are comparing apples with oranges. The price is also for a development kit. So I can imagine the price could be at least half if they sold a few thousand of them.