Household Robots

A lot has been said and forecast about how we will all have personal robots helping us around the house and in other places, maybe restaurants, stores, etc. This all sounds cool and plausible and almost everyone knows that sooner or later it will happen. However, when most people use the phrase “sooner or later” they mean later. In the case of robots this may be true, although we are already seeing a few rudimentary units marketed for things like mowing your lawn or vacuuming your house. I haven’t done any research on these but my guess is that they only work well in a very controlled environment where a human being has already done a pre-flight check for any hazards or corrected any situations that are outside the capabilities of the machine (e.g. tee shirt on the floor, sprinklers accidentally timed to go off during the mowing, etc.). The brain power in these first machines is going to be pretty limited.

Hence, the road to success for robots will undoubtedly be a slow and rocky one, with a lot of pain for the first companies out there. In my opinion, robots will need to be programmed with a tremendous number of contingency algorithms to deal with all the weird problems that can present themselves in the atypical home. Even a 2 year old child is more inventive and resourceful than the best robot will be for quite some time to come.

Maybe I’m being unduly pessimistic but I think that household robots will not be particularly affordable or idiot-proof (translate: successful in the marketplace) until a very large amount of programming is done and tested and debugged and highly integrated down to just a few relatively inexpensive ICs.

Maybe someone can devise a way to reduce the A.I. needed for these machines into a few basic modules that can be mixed and matched for the particular job. Then when the customer gets her mechanical friend home, she plugs it into her PC and over the internet answers a host of questions about her lifestyle and the layout of her apartment and what she wants this guy to do. At that point the mother ship executes a mind-meld with little Robbie so that he has a jump start on dealing with his new home.  Maybe his new owner can even pick a personality, like kids do with ring-tones. I have a remote control that you program over the internet like this (Harmony); a brilliant concept in my opinion. This is the only practical way I can see that the necessary customization can be done relatively easily.

The trick will be to develop enough brain power cheaply and design the myriad of sensors intelligently enough to handle most of the everyday problems so that people aren’t always bitching at the poor little guy. On the other hand, maybe we need someone to yell at when we get home. Someone who won’t talk back or throw things; someone who will just apologize for anything that he might have done and go on about his business. It could happen....