There's a lot of truth in this. I sometimes joke that robot benchmarks should focus on common household chores. Given a basket of mixed laundry, sort and fold everything into organized piles. Load a dishwasher given a sink and counters overflowing with dishes piled up haphazardly. Clean a bedroom that kids have trashed. We do these tasks almost without thinking, but the unstructured nature presents challenges for robots.
Slightly tangential, we already have amazing laundry robots. They are called washing and drying machines. We don't give these marvels enough credit, mostly because they aren't shaped like humans.
Humanoid robots are mostly a waste of time. Task-shaped robots are much easier to design, build, and maintain... and are more reliable. Some of the things you mention might needs humanoid versatility (loading the dishwasher), others would be far better served by purpose-built robots (laundry sorting).
Sadly current "dishwasher" models are neither self-loading nor unloading. (Seems like they should be able to take a tray of dishes, sort them, load them, and stack them after cleaning.)
The problem is more doing it in sufficiently little space, and using little enough water and energy. Doing one that you just feed dishes individually and that immediate wash them and feed them to storage should be entirely viable, but it'd be wasteful, and it'd compete with people having multiple small drawer-style dishwashers, offering relatively little convenience over that.
It seems most people aren't willing to pay for multiple dishwashers - even multiple small ones or set aside enough space, and that places severe constraints on trying to do better.
There isn't a "task-shaped" robot for unstructured and complex manipulation, other than high DoF arms with vision and neural nets. For example, a machine which can cook food would be best solved with two robotic arms. However, these stationary arms would be wasted if they were just idling most of the time. So, you add locomotion and dynamic balancing with legs. And now these two arms can be used in 1000 different tasks, which makes them 1000x more valuable.
So, not only is the human form the only solution for many tasks, it's also a much cheaper solution considering the idle time of task-specific robots. You would need only a single humanoid robot for all tasks, instead of buying a different machine for each task. And instead of having to design and build a new machine for each task, you'll need to just download new software for each task.
I agree. I don’t know where this obsession comes from. Obsession with resembling as close to humans as possible. We’re so far from being perfect. If you need proof just look at your teeth. Yes, we’re relatively universal, but a screwdriver is more efficient at driving in screws that our fingers. So please, stop wasting time building perfect universal robots, build more purpose-build ones.
Given we have shaped so many tasks to fit our bodies, it will be a long time before a bot able to do a variety/majority of human tasks the human way won’t be valuable.
1000 machines specialized for 1000 tasks are great, but don’t deliver the same value as a single bot that can interchange with people flexibly.
The shape doesn't matter! Non-humanoid shapes give minir advantages on specific tasks but for a general robot you'll have a hard time finding a shape much more optimal than humanoid. And if you go with humanoid you have so much data available! Videos contain the information of which movements a robot should execude. Teleoperation is easy.
This is the bitter lesson! The shape doesn't matter, any shape will work with the right architecture, data and training!
Purpose build robots are basically solved. Dishwashers, laundry machines, assembly robots, etc. the moat is a general purpose robot that can do what a human can do.
Great examples. They are simple, reliable, efficient and effective. Far better than blindly copying what a human being does. Maybe there are equally clever ways of doing things like folding clothes.
I maintain that whoever invents a robust laundry folding robot will be a trillionaire. In that, I dump jumbled clean clothes straight from a dryer at it and out comes folded and sorted clothes (and those loner socks). I know we're getting close, but I also know we're not there yet.
We are certainly getting close! In 2010, watching PR2 fold some unseen towels is similar to watching paint dry [1], but we can now enjoy robots attain lazy student-level laundry folding in real-time, as demonstrated by π₀[2].
I can live without folding laundry (I can just shove my undershirts in the closet, who cares if it's not folded), but whoever manufactures a reliable auto-loading dishwasher will have my dollars. Like, just put all your dishes in the sink and let the machine handle them.
But if your dishwasher is empty is takes nearly the same amount of time/effort to put dishes straight into the dishwasher that it does to put them in the sink.
I think I'd only really save time by having a robot that could unload my dishwasher and put up the clean dishes.
That's called a second dishwasher: one is for taking out, the other for putting in. When the latter is full, turn it on, dirty dishes wait outside until the cycle finishes, when the dishwashers switch roles.
I thought about this and it gets even better. You do not really need shelves as you just use the clean dishwasher as the storage place. I honestly don’t know why this is not a thing in big or wealthy homes.
Hmm, that doesn't match my experience. It takes me a lot more time to put dishes into the dishwasher, because it has different places for cutlery, bowls, dishes, and so on, and of course the existing structure never matches my bowls' size perfectly so I have to play tetris or run it with only 2/3 filled (which will cause me to waste more time as I have to do dishes again sooner).
And that's before we get to bits of sticky rice left on bowls, which somehow dishwashers never scrape off clean. YMMV.
1. Get a set of dishes that does fit nicely together in the dishwasher.
2. Start with a cold prewash, preferably with a little powder in there too. This massively helps with stubborn stuff. This one is annoying though because you might have to come back and switch it on after the prewash. A good job for the robot butler.
Why can't dishwashers just be small, single-dish appliances in which you put the plate/mug/wine glass/forks/whatever, close it, push a button, and 10 seconds later it's clean and dry, you unload and repeat?
At this point I'm not sure we'll actually get a task-specific machine for laundry folding/sorting before humanoid robots gain the capability to do it well enough.
Foldimate has gone bankrupt in 2021 [1], and the domain referral from foldimate.com to a 404 page at miele.com, suggests that it was Miele who bought up the remains, not a sketchy company with a ".website" top-level domain.
