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

Give it time

[Okian Warrior]

Give it some time.

As any AI researcher will tell you, we know how the brain works and Geoffrey Hinton's recent paper is nothing short of a breakthrough, and will lead to us having strong AI programs real soon.

We have IBM's Watson, a program that actually understands the information it's processing and will be used to augment medical diagnosis, SIRI, a personal assistant application that actually learns, and MAKO, a program who can do anything on a PC!

IBM is already making neural network chips that implement the way the brain really works, a program the learns the same way that a child learns, and many, many more!

We have courses that teach you AI, and ... it's easy!

Give it some time! We need to let the AI mature like a fine wine, and filter down into consumer devices.

It's coming soon - it really is!

Re:Roomba technology

[Karmashock]

Oh, Roombas are mostly fine. My issue with them more than anything is that they're stupid, don't interface with say a program running on a computer that could make them less stupid, and they've unacceptably high maintenance issues.

The vacuum robots are getting decent. I'd like them to be clever enough to actually have a map of the room and know where they are in it... etc But what really annoys me most about them is that they have too many plastic parts in them. Most of the plastic in the guts of the roomba should be metal... ideally steel. Grit and other assorted shit gets into the gears and that creates friction and the friction creates heat. My last roomba ate itself. It melted its guts out.

You can get after market metal guts to replace the shitty plastic modules that should be made out of stamped stainless steel plate. And that largely resolves the maintenance issues.

However, I still think they should be smarter or should interface with something that is smarter. Have the thing connect via wifi to your network... ideally in a non-mickey mouse way... and then have a more substantial computer do the heavy lifting for it. I'm talking about the sort of thing a Raspberry pi could handle without breaking much of a sweat.

Re:Roomba technology

[Karmashock]

They have no memory of the room even though they routinely operate in the same room.

They do not know where doors are, where given activities happen, etc and thus cannot know where the focus of any cleaning should be.

Their programming is too limited to allow for a larger more effective robot because they're too stupid to clean under things properly the way a human would.

As someone else in the thread said, they don't understand that some things they're touching actually should be left alone. One guy was talking about how his roomba just spread cat vomit all over the place because his cat will throw up... as cats do... and then the roomba will roll over it and wipe cat vomit all over the place.

There are an enourmous number or problems with the brain of the thing. And I appreciate that it isn't economical to put that kind of brain power into the roomba... so don't. Most of the robots you see coming out of DARPA these days have most of the brains outside of the robot itself. Its all software running on a laptop or something. And if required for the brain to be in the machine for some competition they just make a cradle for the laptop ON the robot and just put the laptop on the robot.

So there you go... Roombas don't have the brain power they should. They should have a detailed 3d map of the area they operate in, they should know where things get dirty both from logging done by the roomba itself and by what a human would program into it by saying "here are doors".

A bigger robot could do a better job cleaning. Anyone that uses a roomba knows that it takes it DAYS to clean a room and it only keeps rooms clean at all because the fucking thing is scurrying around every day doing about as much cleaning in a week as I would in 30 minutes once a week. That limitation limits how much the roomba can clean. It should be able to clean an entire house. My vacuum cleaner... the one I as a human use... can clean the entire house. But the Roomba can't do that. It can't navigate the house and say "clean this room today" and "that room tomorrow"... and its so inefficient in the way it clean any room that it has to clean the same room several times to actually clean it at all.

And as the man said... cat vomit... or anything gross... gets spread around everywhere.

I could go on... but if you tell me it is as smart as it needs to be, I disagree. The thing it doesn't do which really pisses me off is it can't navigate and doesn't have a map of the house. That's the dumbest.