WSJ:  I Tried the Robot That’s Coming to Live With You. It’s Still Part Human.

WSJ:  I Tried the Robot That’s Coming to Live With You. It’s Still Part Human.

The 5-foot-6-inch robot shuffled to the dishwasher, pulled the door handle and slid a fork—tines up, naturally—into the silverware holder. Then it grabbed a towel to wipe the counter. Later, it folded my sweater and fetched a bottle of water from the fridge.

Don’t try living in a science fiction future, it’s a sham. 

The goal is for Neo to do all of that autonomously. But a 1X expert teleoperator, wearing a VR headset and wielding videogame-like controllers, was behind all those moves.

Don’t spend the $20,000 to buy one of these because it relies on a puppet master to do anything.  Renting it for $499 per month, means that it can be returned after six months when it fails to impress.

Innovation is incremental, and each step has a new problem to be solved.  A humanoid robot is supposed to solve all of the domestic problems.  That’s too much.

We are not going to get Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons.

We should be so lucky.  A humanoid robot is the wrong shape.

The article doesn’t mention how long the battery lasts, but there isn’t much room in that form .  If the robot is moving, the battery probably lasts less than 15 minutes.  Rosie has a big fat ass, so could have a battery that is five times larger.

Walking is slow, complex and unstable. Rosie is a cartoon, so only has a single row of wheels.  Two sets of wheels or treads would be much simpler.

A robot that can do a variety of tasks will require an AI to direct it.  AI isn’t universally reliable, so the company is using humans to help with the tricky stuff. 

Here’s what the human-directed robot was able to do.

  • Grab water from the fridge. After an awkward dance with the door, the bot snagged the bottle and triumphantly delivered it to me, 10 feet away.
  • Load the dishwasher. Nailed it…eventually. A fork in the holder, two plastic glasses on the top rack and a shaky squat to shut the door—all in just five minutes. I may have applauded.
  • Fold a sweater. Not retail-ready, but two minutes later, the sweater was…folded. (The dexterity of humanoid hands is a big challenge.)

Those are three distinctly different tasks.  A fake human is not the answer.

Domestic robots will be serious when there is an incremental evolution.  Here’s how it could happen.

 I had Roomba for the solarium because the floor is tile and there is sawdust from the firewood.  It usually ran for 10 minutes, then got stuck on a power cord or jammed up under the couch.  I didn’t stick with it.

Had I modified the room so the Roomba didn’t get stuck, it would have worked fine.  I’m not very committed to housekeeping.  Now, there are versions that can mop the floor.

I don’t follow the industry, but it would be a short step to make a Roomba into a surveillance robot.  It could come out of it’s charging bay occasionally to patrol the house if it was equipped with a camera, and sensors to pick up sound, smoke, humidity and temperature.

The user could check on the house remotely, or interact with pets.  None of that would be difficult to do with existing technology.  The idea is to take existing technology, like a Roomba, and consider what else it may be able to do.

A Roomba would be good at those tasks, it would be useful to some customers and it wouldn’t be much more expensive than current models.   It would sell for under a thousand bucks.

People who travel often, want to interact or monitor a pet, or have an elderly parent they’d like to check on, might find that very useful.

The next step would be a bigger, canister-shaded robot like R2D2.  It could feed pets, water plants, fetch glasses of water, along with vacuuming and mopping.  Some adaptations might be needed around the home, like RFID or visual targets on plants or dog bowls.  Beverages, water or pet food would need to be accessible to the robot.

That’s how domestic robots will work.  Getting a fake human to do all tasks the way you would do them if you weren’t too lazy, is just stupid.

Like, do sweaters need to be folded, or can they go on hangers?