Some companies find only humans can do the job

People already get jiggy with other people who could easily bite off important bits.

The issue is trust, and I think that even with the simplest of failsafes[1], the machine juggling your important bits can be made more trustworthy than the human currently doing it.

[1] For example, failing in an off position, or using equipment that, even if overdriven at full force, will not have enough force to do damage. Having the clamping or piston mechanism driven off a spring can ensure that the maximum force applied depends on the stiffness of the spring, which gets softer with age, not harder.

There's multiple ways currently being used to make machines that interact with humans safe for humans no matter what happens.

This is true of automated IT processes in general; for human-operated processes there's always a certain amount of "slack" between how the process is written and what needs to be done to make it actually work. The knowledge for the latter is concentrated in lower-ranking staff - the "NCOs" - and often unknown and unknowable to those running the system. Converting the system to automation only converts the known process, so it tends to fail hard until the slack can be taken up elsewhere or learned and incorporated.

All of the things you say are true. There is one additional thing you don’t mention:

You can drum up people on minimal wage, you give them a roll of bin bags and point at a street and tell them (verbally with words) “pick up the litter on that street, once the bags are full put it in the truck. At the end of the day drive to for disposal” And it will with high probability happen!

Yeah they might goof off and you might need a foreman with a slightly higher wage to keep them busy, but that is basically all the “programing” you need to do.

How would the same work with a robot? Someone needs to program it. It is not unreasonable to think that one day we might have a “general trash collection” AI you can licence, but it is a lot of work to develop that system.

Whoever programs that system will need to solve issues such as:

- cover the whole street, but don’t wander into private estabilishments, peoples gardens or block the street

- pick up cigarete butts from the planters, but not the flowers, but do pick up the dried up fallen leaves/petals

- pick up the half shoe a reveller left on the corner, but don’t pick up the street performer’s hat with his coins in it

- hastle / don’t hastle the homeless based on opaque rules subject to change all the time

- shovel up the dirt from the pavement, but don’t try to dig a hole to china in the spots where grass should be but it dried out and it is basically just a patch of dirt

- empty the street bins, even the one which looks a bit odd (it was a one-off pilot project and we decided to go with a different suplier eventually) or the one which is hard to open (give it a good thunk, it jams since someone drove into it 5 months ago)

- leave the traffic cones be, but bag that one which was run over by a truck, dragged out of place, and got crumpled

And probably 15 other edge cases I can’t even think right now. And when your cleaner robot gets into a bad situation it probably won’t learn to avoid the same situation the next time.

And what happens if something changes? Let’s say you now want to collect aluminium into a separate bag, or there is a street festival with different temporary rules, or something?

To reprogram your robots you need highly trained, specialist crew, costing big bucks.

If your human crew needs “reprograming” you can email a middle manager paid 120% minimal wage who will make them change their way.

And all of this is “just software”. You have all this hassle even after all the battery and hardware issues you mentioned.

We might get street cleaning robots one day, but it is a very though task and i wouldn’t hold my breath.