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SaintLouisduHaHa t1_j9tvcpr wrote

One advantage household robots have over a lot of other automated technologies is that they do not need to be fast or particularly efficient at their jobs. People work for roughly 8 hours a day working and sleep for roughly 8 hours a day, a robot might have a total of 16 hours in which to do maybe one to two hours of household chores. I think a lot of people would pay significant amount of money for robot that straightens up, folds some laundry, dusts, and unloads the dishwasher. Maybe puts away the groceries too. None of these have to be done especially quickly either.

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son_of_tigers t1_j9u2bm5 wrote

and does it slowly so it doesn't get in my way or make too much noise? that's a feature

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WilliamMorris420 t1_j9vjcim wrote

My robot vac is so quiet that it can hoover in the middle of the night and nobody can hear it. All it needs, is its bin emptying about once a week and to be moved from upstairs to downstairs. Eventually I'll get around to getting one with a mopping feature and have one for upstairs and one for downstairs. But as the house gets hovered twice a day it's always immaculate. A Shark cleaner can't compete, as it would just never get used as much.

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jejcicodjntbyifid3 t1_j9vkge3 wrote

Mine is not that quiet what's yours? Mines one of the WiFi Roomba vacuum models but it is quite loud, and on hardwood

Usually I just schedule it for when I leave which sure beats me regularly vacuuming myself. My biggest annoyance is how hungry it is for cables, tearing down anything that it's attached to...

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WilliamMorris420 t1_j9vrk5m wrote

Ecovacs Deebot but its mainly on carpet. The main problem with it, is that it's dumb and just goes around a room randomly. So one area gets cleaned five times and an other only gets done once. It's a few years old and was pretty cheap for the time.

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jejcicodjntbyifid3 t1_j9wn2la wrote

Oh yeah those random ones take forever and depending on the configuration it might never end up hitting places you want

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WilliamMorris420 t1_j9xim8w wrote

To be fair the carpet is spotless. With the newer models having intelligent mapping. Which is an other reason for wanting to get an other robot. But it's hard to justify whilst the current one is still working.

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jejcicodjntbyifid3 t1_j9yhspi wrote

I hear ya, and these things are kinda obsolete pretty quickly, and they're so new, waiting a few years will come out with much better

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No_Section2505 t1_j9we0rj wrote

My friend just got one of these. However, she has a fairly small house, like we do (I mean 2500 sq ft so not that small but not huge).

Unfortunately, the little vacuum and it's container "lives" on the side of the wall in her living room. It's an eye sore. Looks like more clutter. That's not such a great invention for cleaning 🤷🏻‍♀️

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ledow t1_j9v83fd wrote

I wouldn't trust a robot - especially an *AI* robot - inside my house that has the strength to unload plates from dishwashers, lift laundry, etc. in close proximity to humans at any speed. There's a reason that industrial control robots are all behind yellow hazard lines. You're talking a literally crush/injury hazard.

Fold laundry? Not a chance it would be able to do the computer vision to do that with any accuracy.

Same for dusting, unless you found a kind of air-jet or similar.

Unload the dishwasher? It would be cheaper and easier to NOT BOTHER... just make the dishwasher twice-height. Lower is the dishwasher. Upper is storage on a sprung rack like in a restaurant. You now have a "cupboard" full of dishes stacked in their place, and you have integrated into the machine that washes them and which need only "raise" them out of the dishwasher into the storage section.

Puts away the groceries? Not a chance. Again, it's just easier to say "here's a modular grocery cart that gets delivered in a standardised way, here's a special cupboard that is labelled, here's a fixed, dumb robot that can put one into the other". No AI involved, no computer vision, no customised bespoke per-customer setup, no hazards, obstacles, confusions, choices.

I think a FEW people would pay through the nose to get a gimmick AI piece of junk that's not very good at the job.

Literally the closest we've had to any of your suggestions was that robot that was put into a burger joint at great expense, and unless a human lined up the ingredients perfectly for it, it wouldn't work at all, and most of the time it was slower, less able to cope, and easy to confuse, jam, break, etc. Didn't they shut that one down in the end?

I love my robot vacuum, don't get me wrong. The same principle as you state... I turn Bob (I named him, if you don't anthropomorphise your computers, you don't care about them enough) on before I leave for work. He does a good few hours of random-path vacuuming over several surfaces, avoids stairs, bumps off walls, then when his battery is low, he self-homes. That "time-saving" is enormous.

But he get 95% of the floor debris. He's not great on corners. He gets stuck under the radiator. I have to booby-trap the bathroom so he can't approach the penguin floor mat that he likes to shag (he literally gets stuck on it, and then his wheels try to reel it in so it looks like he's devouring the poor animal).

However, vacuuming 95% of my floor debris, every day, for the press of one button, means that vacuuming is no longer a chore and even when I want to go "all out", I only have the other 5% to worry about.

There is no way that in just 10 years we will progress AI to have even a handful more domestic chores be automated, let alone 40% of them. And each time, they can be outclassed by a dumb machine half their cost just doing a decent enough job. I don't want a robot butler who walks around and waters my plants. I want a small, cheap irrigation system with dumb, cheap hardware, so that nobody has to. Bob is dumb. Sensor-controlled. No "floor-maps". No "lasers". Even the self-homing is just two blinky IR LEDs like a Wiimote bar on his charger and he wanders randomly until he spots them and then uses them to home in. It doesn't NEED to be AI to be useful and get the job done.

Same way I don't need a robot arm to unload my dishwasher. I could just have a dumb mechanism in the dishwasher move the "clean plates" baskets up into an empty cupboard above it, for me to select a plate from next time I'm cooking like it's just a shelf full of plates. A fraction of the cost, far easier technology, same effect, literally available now if someone could be bothered to build one (a dishwasher, a cupboard, a sliding motorised rail, and a couple of relays.

Waiting for AI for this stuff is *dumb*. Using *dumb* technology to actually change how we live is *smart*.

Same for "smart cars". I don't want smart cars. I want a dumb car that runs on rails and doesn't need to interpret the road at all. I want individual rail pods that navigate fixed, well-defined, well-controlled, simple rail systems that follow every major road, where the control between you and the "car" in front is a mechanical linkage that means they cannot collide.

Simpler, safer, cheaper, available with current technology.

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play_yr_part t1_j9w0cbl wrote

This post sums up perfectly how I feel about "The internet of things" and "smart" tech etc.

I'm not against technology like that improving our lives and automating chores but so much of the stuff that's come out recently is so fucking annoying if it goes wrong or has the potential of a short life span if the product is no longer supported.

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TortiousStickler t1_j9xxbhh wrote

Totally agree with you, but picking your brain, laundry is the bane of my household existence. Do you think the tech is there for end to end laundry?

Wash, dry iron and fold/ hang

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Kinexity t1_j9u88wf wrote

I think the really big thing would be a robot which can cook. No need to go to restaurant and pay a lot of money for decent food when you can ask your robot to make it for you when you come back from work.

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SaintLouisduHaHa t1_j9ua0jb wrote

That's just it though, a robot that is fast enough and flexible enough to cook in a household kitchen can likely do everything else pretty effectively too. Low level household chores, done slowly, is something we're getting close to actually accomplishing.

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altmorty t1_j9uqdg2 wrote

More likely that automated restaurants would use robots to quickly and cheaply produce, serve or deliver food. More people could then take advantage of them. It would be more cost efficient than everyone having one at home.

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Kinexity t1_j9uqy4v wrote

If it was for cooking only then what you say makes sense but if people already had robots to do chores then they may as have cooking functionality.

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EconomicRegret t1_j9xqzer wrote

> No need to go to restaurant and pay a lot of money for decent food

If that becomes reality. It's gonna be a future where, like musicians, 3 stars and other star Chefs will write, perform and upload their recipes with cooking techniques included. We will buy and download those "recipes", which would automatically give your robot not only new recipes, but also new skills.

Restaurants will still exist, but the vast majority of them automated. And cooks will be like musicians. Only a very small minority will make a living. While the rest will do it as a side gig, a hobby.

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Kinexity t1_j9ygnsn wrote

The big assumption in your comment is that you would need people to think up recipies. Just like with image generation it will probably turn out that a dumb model can do that just as well as a human.

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[deleted] t1_j9zyooo wrote

I love cooking and can do it well, I think I’ll always cook. Cleaning up is another matter.

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Kinexity t1_ja003li wrote

Then all the more power to you. No one is going to ban humans from cooking. Most people either lack time or will and bad diet is a serious problem which is why I think of cooking automation as a necessity.

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[deleted] t1_ja03rld wrote

No they certainly aren’t but to make a machine that has the tools available to to make the variety of dishes to the level of a good human cook is going to be ridiculously expensive to buy and run. I would assume a 3D printer type setup will be the future of quick nutritious meals, can’t see too many cyborgs in the kitchen in the foreseeable future.

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arckeid t1_j9u7k5l wrote

I am pretty sure this type of robot would save so much relationships.

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ty_fighter84 t1_j9um4xq wrote

See the Roomba. I haven't touched a vacuum cleaner in roughly 4 years.

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EconomicRegret t1_j9xrgp4 wrote

Genuinely curious, can the Roomba handle corners, around the feet of chairs, of tables, and at the edge of walls meeting flours? What about behind furnitures?

I feel nervous at the idea of having to vacuum manually again anyways, because of patches of unvacuumed areas... That's why I haven't bought into the automated vacuum cleaners yet.

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MrFantasticallyNerdy t1_j9v4zt2 wrote

>Maybe puts away the groceries too. None of these have to be done especially quickly either.

Mother robot: Shut that fridge door now! Do you think we're made of money??!!

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TheRoadsMustRoll t1_j9v5837 wrote

> ...they do not need to be fast or particularly efficient at their jobs.

so i'm going to invest money in cutting edge technology that isn't particularly efficient? wtf?

i already have a partner who follows her rumba around to make sure it gets in all the tough places (while i just get out the vacuum once a week.)

my life has much more enjoyment when i'm not spending my time and energy over-automating simple chores but that's just me.

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SaintLouisduHaHa t1_j9v9szn wrote

The point is a robot that does basic household tasks slowly is possible, at least in the somewhat foreseeable future and has a reasonable use case for early adopters, even if it does cost in the five figures. Think about how many households own a second car just to make somebody’s commute shorter. Time is really valuable.

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TheRoadsMustRoll t1_j9vbs7s wrote

>The point is a robot that does basic household tasks slowly is possible...
>
>Time is really valuable.

yeah. like AI bots that start a paragraph with one premise and then end the paragraph with the exact opposite premise.

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