Robots not ready to clean the bathroom
Home versions need a good bit more work — and the cost needs to come down
For at least a decade, robotics and artificial intelligence startups have flexed their ability to create machines that can complete practical household tasks.
Last month, Boston Dynamics showed its Spot robot dog picking up clothing. Miso Robotic’s Flippy has been flipping burgers for years. Other startups have demonstrated laundry-folding machines. The list goes on. More recently, news broke that Amazon may be closer to introducing a home robot capable of carrying things and following its owner’s commands.
But how probable is it that consumers will ever be able to own a true robotic butler?
Robots are getting more complex. As AI continues to advance, it allows machines to figure out more complex problems and reliably chat with humans. Still, robotics and artificial intelligence firms say it’ll be quite some time before consumers can own anything remotely similar to Rosey the Robot from
“The Jetsons.”
In fact, companies are having a hard time commercializing anything more complex than a robot vacuum — which has been cleaning houses for 20 years.
“We’ve been talking about home robots coming for a long time, and all we have so far is the vacuum cleaner,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation. “You see demos, but taking it from a demo to something that actually works, then something you can afford, that’s the issue right now.”
Chore robots are doing well in factories where there’s plenty of space, no small kids around and employees wearing protective gear. They’re really good at completing a single repetitive task, such as screwing on a wheel.
But imagine introducing machinery with legs and lifting capabilities into a home where things can and do go wrong. What if it falls on someone, or a software update causes it to go haywire? It’s funny on “The Jetsons,”
but it would not be so comical if grandma was on the receiving end.
That’s a significant challenge.
The biggest problem is safety, said Marc Raibert, chairman and former CEO of Boston Dynamics, a robotics pioneer responsible for agile, animallike robots.
“The more complicated the robot, the more safety concerns. If you have a robot in close proximity to a person, and anything that goes wrong, that’s a risk to that person,” Raibert said.
Things have gone wrong on the job. In 2015, a 22-year-old man was killed while helping set up a stationary robot at a Volkswagen plant in Germany. The robot pushed him against a metal plate and crushed him. In another case that year, a robot’s arm malfunctioned, and it hit and crushed a woman’s head in a Michigan auto plant.
It’s not that the safety issues at home cannot be solved. It’s that they have not been solved yet, robotics companies say. And making elaborate machines more household-friendly will raise the price.
Today’s mobile robots for factories can cost twice as much as an average new car. Take the robotic dog Spot. It runs for about $75,000 without the arm attachment that makes it useful for transporting things. Without the arm, it’s basically a mobile surveillance machine. A humanoid robotic butler capable of autonomously completing a variety of tasks today could easily cost 10 times as much.
And robotics experts say people on the market for such a thing would not be willing to pay more than a few thousand dollars. It might be cheaper to pay a human to do the job. And humans might do it better.
In 2020, Walmart pulled its inventory robots from the floor after reportedly finding that humans can scan products more simply and more efficiently than bulky 6-foottall machines.
Robots also have a dexterity problem. Most can pinch, grasp or use suction to hold an object. Meanwhile, humans can manipulate things that come in various shapes and textures. Robotic limbs with humanlike flexibility do exist, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce.
“The age of grasping is still a long way away,” said Tim Enwall, CEO of Misty Robotics, a hardware company that builds personal robots for homes and offices. “It is a very hard problem to solve at a mass-consumption price point.”
Another challenge is that robots do not know much about the world they’re operating in. You can teach them what an object looks like, but robotic butlers also would need to understand where in a home it is.
Take, for example, a simple task such as putting a drink into the fridge. A machine would need to understand a command and be capable of autonomously navigating a home’s layout without spilling anything. It also needs to understand which room in a house is the kitchen.
That type of data requires collaborative input from consumers, and it’s something iRobot is working on by letting Roomba users mark where things are in their homes.
“The reason why iRobot doesn’t sell a robot with an arm is because we don’t know where anything is,” said Colin Angle, chairman and founder of iRobot. “We’re trying to get a better idea of what you actually want to do. That’s useful for your cleaning robot, but it’s imperative for whatever next robot you’re interested in buying.”
So when will something more advanced than a smart vacuum cleaner actually make an impact? Most say it’ll be decades from now.
Amazon reportedly is investing in its “Vesta” home robot project. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Robots probably will continue to crop up in new places as firms lay the groundwork for something more advanced to come along.
People will see more robots delivering food, carrying packages, cleaning surfaces and toting groceries.
“I do think we’ll find uses for home robots in the next eight to 10 years,” Raibert said. “Someone will pioneer a lower-cost mechanism that does a useful set of things. I do believe it; it’s just not tomorrow.”