Here's what I want robots to do: 1) Wash my dishes, dry them and put them away completely automatically. 2) Wash and dry my clothes, fold them and put them away completely automatically. These two things would save me hours of work per week. FoldiMate simply isn't even close to being good enough, but I'd be willing to spend about that much for a robot that could do #2. I can vacuum my floor by myself and greet people…
> 1) Wash my dishes, dry them and put them away completely automatically. I had a thought about this some time ago. What if every cupboard was a dishwasher? You just put dirty dishes away in the "cupboard", and then they get washed once the machine detects that there are too many dirty ones, and it can blow air through the cupboard to dry them off once it's done, and then you just open a cupboard and take out some cl…
That would mean either you wash every time you put in a dirty dish (which would be wasteful) - or you accept that you always have some dirty dishes mixed between your clean ones, including the food remains, fluids, smell, etc that come with them. Sounds really unpleasant.
More practical problems:
- Dishes can be stored a lot more space-efficiently in a normal cupboard than in a dish washer. You'd need a lot more space if all your cupboards are dishwashers. Putting in dishes correctly is also more complex for a dishwasher than for a cupboard - so instead of saving the effort to empty the dishwasher, you've multiplied that effort to all of your cupboards.
- A cleaning run takes time. If cleaning runs start automatically, you'll have random parts of your kitchen inaccessible at random points of time.
- If you used a normal dishwasher you find out very quickly that drying is not perfect - if you leave clean dishes for too long in the airtight compartment, you might as well rinse them again. If the cupboard are meant to store the dishes permanently, that problem will get bigger.