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

[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:Never

[mark-t]

We say we'd be happy with a robot that could clean our homes. They made one that does some of that

Emphasis on *SOME*....

In general, keeping a home clean entails a whole lot more than just vacuuming an area that is already free of clutter. It entails keeping the area free of clutter in the first place... This requires that a robot know where everything in the house belongs when it is put away, and will automatically clean and put things away that are left unattended for a sufficiently long period of time. Obviously, it should also know how to do this in a manner that does not in any way jeopardize the health or well-being of the occupants.

"We say we'd be happy with a robot that can clean our homes...." show me one that actually *CAN* clean my home, and we'll talk. Really, an oversized hockey-puck that can only vacuum one floor, can't do stairs, doesn't always cope well with pet fur, and can't figure out that just because it doesn't fit into an area right now because of how things happened to be positioned doesn't mean it shouldn't be vacuumed doesn't cover even half of the job of vacuuming for a lot of people, myself included, and probably not even a tenth of the total job of keeping a place clean and tidy. Forget about expecting cooking or driving kids to school or babysitting them or whatnot.... You claim that people are going to give AI a moving target when it comes to the matter of a robot housekeeper, how about just hitting the fucking original desired target of actually just keeping a house clean?

Re:Give it time

[MrL0G1C]

As any AI researcher will tell you, we know how the brain works

An exaggeration, we know bits about how the brain works.

and will lead to us having strong AI programs real soon.

Lol, really, tech world have been saying this for decades.

We have IBM's Watson, a program that actually understands the information it's processing

No, it does not understand the information it's processing, stop making stuff up.

IBM is already making neural network chips that implement the way the brain really works

Again, these chips have been around for decades, nothing new.