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: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.