What Comes After the Roomba?
Full dosclosure: I am a roboticist. I&#x27;ve been in the field professionally for about thirty years.<p>I&#x27;m <i>really</i> skeptical that there is anything “after the roomba”. Or, to be more specific, I&#x27;m skeptical that technology used in the home will look anything like a robot, a self-contained intelligent machine that moves around and cleans&#x2F;folds laundry&#x2F;does dishes.<p>Ther are a couple of reasons for this. This first is that these problems are extremely hard to solve. And this is not true just in terms of algorithms, but also in terms of hardware. A humanoid robot is as complex as, if not more complex than, an automobile. Currently, humanoid robots go for $500,000 a pop. Even after economies of scale it&#x27;s hard for me to imagine that getting below $50,000 — much less $5,000, which is probably the price range that makes them viable as anything other than a novelty for wealthy people.<p>Which brings up the second point. One thing I have learned the hard way in robotics is that you have to understand precisely what your competition is and how much money that competition requires to solve the problem. In the case of an in-home robot, for most of us the competition is our own labor or that of our significant others&#x2F;kids&#x2F;housemates. But we are not the early adopters of this technology. Wealthy people are. For wealthy people, the competition is either a live-in assistant or a contract cleaning service. Contract cleaning services pay their workers approximately minimum wage. Minimum wage is a very difficult price target for a robot to meet.<p>And the third issue is that to first approximation <i>these problems are already solved</i>. And not by what we would consider a robot, but by appliances. My grandmother, for most of her life, kept house without elecricity, and hence without a dishwasher, vacuum, or dryer. These appliances dramatically reduced the effort it takes to keep house, without being robots. I strongly suspect that any cost-efficient solution to folding clothes or taking dirty dishes from the sink and turning them into clean dishes in a cupboard will resemble an appliance. If you want your dishes cleaned robotically, then you don&#x27;t put a robot in the kitchen. You turn the kitchen into a robot.