How Long Until We Have a Home Robot That Lives Up To the Hype?

moon_unit2 writes: You may have heard of "personal robots" such as Jibo, Buddy, and Pepper. One journalist recently met one of these home bots and found the reality less dazzling than the promotional videos. Whereas the Indiegogo clips of Buddy show the robot waking people up and helping with cooking, the current prototype can only perform a few canned tasks, and it struggles with natural language processing and vision. As the writer notes, the final version may be a lot more sophisticated, but it's hard to believe that real home helpers are just around the corner.

Comments

Re:Roomba technology

[AmiMoJo]

LG's Hom Bot maps rooms. It uses a camera pointed at the ceiling to create a map, as well as the usual IR distance and bump sensors. Neato make one with lidar that does a similar thing.

The LG robot is pretty good. It learns the room and then doesn't bump into things as much. The only problem is that it only has one map, so if you say take it upstairs it has no idea where it is and is more or less as dumb as the rest of them. It is really quiet though and does an excellent job of cleaning.

The Neato is junk, unfortunately. The batteries die quickly due to poor power management, and the lidar doesn't seem to help it much.

The thing is, a cheap Lidl robot that only has a bump sensor is not that much worse, and costs a fraction as much. It may be dumb and doesn't have a brush roller, but it's persistent. Simply by covering the same area repeatedly it eventually lifts quite a lot of dust. So there are rapidly diminishing returns for intelligence and advanced sensors.