Who&#x27;s profitable?  Once upon a time, 1983 was the year of the robotic startup. That didn&#x27;t end well.[1]  It looked so promising back then; mapping using ultrasonic sensor was starting to work. But it wasn&#x27;t good enough.<p>So far, the only profitable autonomous products are industrial robots and vacuum cleaners.  (The surgical robots like DaVinci are teleoperators.) Even Boston Dynamics, in the end, failed to produce a usable product; the LS3 (the militarized version of BigDog) was canceled.<p>The technology is much better today than ever before, and there&#x27;s a lot that could be done. But so far, there&#x27;s nothing that&#x27;s cost effective enough to be produced in volume.  Except robot vacuum cleaners.<p>If robot vacuum cleaners were cost effective and able to keep out out of trouble (such as getting snagged in cords) most offices would be using them. That&#x27;s not happening yet.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.frc.ri.cmu.edu&#x2F;~hpm&#x2F;project.archive&#x2F;robot.papers&#x2F;2000&#x2F;Denning.Mobile.Robotics.bankruptcy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.frc.ri.cmu.edu&#x2F;~hpm&#x2F;project.archive&#x2F;robot.papers...</a>