6 S's of Capable Home Robots - Page 3

I thought we were in agreement here, but maybe I misunderstood your
comment.

NASA **could** build a domestic robot of the type needed to open stuck
pickle jars, get milk out of the refrigerator, and pick up the loose
kitty food off the floor. They have chosen not to. A research lab of the
caliber of an MIT or Carnegie Mellon could do the same, and probably
some gifted individuals with enough time and money on their hands could
as well. Obviously, all the above have chosen a different path, or else
they've kept their developments secret.

-- Gordon

No, I don't believe they could, to a quality suitable for industry.
One in twenty times, the pickle jar would get broken, the milk
dropped, and the kitty litter smudged into the carpet. They'd have
a manual override that could activate the recovery of such situations,
as they did whenever the Mars rovers got stuck, but that wouldn't be
acceptable in either a home nor an industrial environment. Just think
of the liability claims, for one thing.

Until such things are profitable in an industrial environment, where
the payoff may be 10-100x, they won't become cheap enough in the home
environment.

Clifford Heath.

Obviously. But my point was a *design capable of*, leaving accuracy,
dependability, and liability as asterisks to the main goal of creating a
robot physically capable of doing the tasks to begin with.

Is that a fair measure? Absolutely. Most well-established industrial
robots fail miserably when used outside the highly controlled
environment they were designed for. Robots used in automotive cease to
function, and can cause damage to themselves and the product they are
making, if there is an error of just fractions of an inch in the
assembly line. There is little room for error. This is an accepted
limitation.


This is what I've been saying all along.

-- Gordon

My 2 cents

A lot of the problems for a CHR result from the unstructured environment. I
think the only way to progress is to work on the environment at the same
time as the robot. People spend very large sums of money on kitchens and
such like - what is needed is the kitchen/house to be a workplace suitable
for some kind of roboticisation.

Consider cleaning the floor. One problem for a logical Roomba is
navigation - now supose that all furniture/walls are marked with infra red
visible bar codes - a simple scanner and not so simple software can build up
a map. Similarly, if flexes must lie on the floor, make sure they are
visible to that scanner.

A kitchen is a much more challenging place. One problem is that a robot
takes up space, tends to either be in the way or falling over all the time

Imagine instead that you build into kitchen units and workspace a set of
tracks. The robot hooks itself into those tracks, runs around to collect and
deliver things. This could be quite a neat and compact arrangement, but also
quite strong. ( Clearly you need to do all the obvious anti collision
stuff )

You need cold storage that can be accessed by our railway line.

You store food in a limited range of containers, again with bar codes or
whatever to identify type or location

I guess the point I'm making is that you need to consider the whole system,
and if you do that I expect that no General Purpose Capable Home Robot will
ever be built - rather you will have a home with built in robotic
technology.

Dave

In my house I'd say less than 10% of the walls are accessible;
everything else is covered by furniture, bookshelves, cat stuff. I'm not
sure how I'd get barcodes on by Barcalounger.

The ceiling is usually pretty good for navigation. Some commercial
indoor navigation systems (speficically NorthStar, promoted by Evolution
Robotics) works this way. It's used in the Rovio WiFi toy robot, put out
by WoowWee.

I think barcodes are a good idea for warehouses and other environments
where adding the labels won't hurt the decor, and where the space is
more open.

-- Gordon

Perhaps what's needed is a hand-held barcoder that has an
inkjet head the squirts infra-red opaque transparent ink
as you roll the head over a surface. That way you could
invisibly barcode lotsa things and if some were unreadable,
tough, there's be enough others visible.


The ceiling doesn't contain movable obstacles - the floor does.

Clifford Heath.

Um, "NorthStar", celestrial navigation... Not a new concept here.

Obstacles on floors aren't used for navigation because they are not
reliable sources of telling you where you are. You steer around them,
but you don't calculate your position with them.

-- Gordon

You misunderstood. My point is that navigation is more than positioning.
If you use enough markers around the walls at floor level you can help
yourself identify obstacles when you *don't* see one you expect, because
it's blocked. Two birds, one stone. All you need is a continuous frieze
of (possibly invisible, IR) barcode around the walls.

Got it. Agreed.

(Though I think this is more practical in non-home settings where, in my
opinion, is the more progressive setting for robotics use. This is an
adoption problem, not one of technology. Example: when was the last time
you saw an automated floor sweeper at McDonald's? That's where they're
needed - not because McDonald's is dirtier than a home, just that it
would be the natural place for a robotic floor sweeper. Driving industry
to adopt these things takes a lot of time, money, and effort, but it's a
significantly more profitable market than the home. Certainly iRobot is
working toward this, as should other people. THESE types of applications
are where we'll find the next Bill Gates...)

-- Gordon

The final goal is to accomplish some of the tasks on my list of 90+
things that a robot could do. This may mean "cheating" when necessary
to aid the robot using  the things you mentioned. We often think about
robots helping humans but in some cases the humans need to help the
robot in some manner to collectively accomplish the goals.

Dave:

I think you have the correct basic idea although we would
probably differ on the details.  What you are describing
is what I call "meet in the middle" robotics.  This is
robotics where the environment has been adjusted to help the
robot without making it too onerous for the humans who must
cohabit the environment.

For example, consider the task of clearing the table.  With
arbitrary silverware, plates, etc, it is a pretty daunting
task.  If the plates and silverware have RFID tags embedded,
it *may* be much easier.  If the plates and silverware are
further color coded, it *may* get easier still.  Similar,
strategy can be employed for sorting laundry into whites,
lights, and colors.

The trick is to make sure that the environment modifications
are not too expensive or obtrusive.

-Wayne

     Well, considering the results of the Flight Telerobotic Servicer
program, no, NASA couldn't.

                John Nagle

" Also remember that the lack of a product of an obvious idea doesn't
mean
 everyone else has overlooked something. If a functional (key word
here)
 home robot doesn't exist, despite there supposidly being the
technology
 for it, there must be a reason. What could that reason be?"


That's a million dollar question but it happened with the Roomba. The
technology in the Roomba was available back in the 80's but for
whatever reason it took 20 years for a company like iRobot to come out
with an affordable robotic vacuum.

I don't believe at the price needed to make a commercially product
viable, and that includes a price low enough to encourage the average
consumer to buy it. At (say) $200 they have to make the Roomba for
around $50, at the most. That's a lot of robot for fifty bucks. The
Roomba is also quite deceptive. Robots in the 80s could barely be relied
upon to re-home; it's rare when the Roomba can't.

People are still forgetting a basic tenet here: with enough money you
can build just about anything - a rocket to take you into outer space.
But can you afford it? Just because it's technologically possible
doesn't mean is feasible.

-- Gordon

Is a $2,000 Readybot like robot considered affordable? To me something
that is not affordable and a bit out there is all the full size
humanoid robots coming out of Japan (ie: ASIMO). I think a PC on
wheels with arms is doable and affordable with today's technology.

Not affordable for what I saw Readybot could do as a domestic robot. As
a research or learning tool that's quite a different matter.

A robot that dumps food from a plate into the sink (especially when the
plate needs to be set out so that the robot can get to it) is not a
compelling story, IMO. (Yes, I know it's just a demonstration, but it
doesn't move me in any way.)

A robotic device that swims in the water of a backyard swimming pool,
senses the erratic motion of when a person falls in and is flailing
about, and attempts to rescue that person by going over and becoming a
floatation device, now that's compelling. Especially compelling if the
robot is also cleaning the pool as it swims around.

-- Gordon

I'll add "rescue drowning person from the pool" to my list of 90
things a robot could do.

In terms of saving a life, a capable home robot could sense smoke in a
home and open the back door to let the dog out into a fenced back
yard. Rescuing one's dog from a fire would be priceless to most pet
owners. A robot could also let the paramedics into a home if it sensed
that an owner had collapsed due to a life threatening situation (ie:
heart attach, diabetic shock, etc).

Maybe. On the face of it, it sounds like a good plan to open doors in a
fire. Unless you've seen Backdraft. Oddly enough, it's probably safest
not to have robots go around opening doors unless they have all sorts of
sensors to determine if it's safe. But besides that, it would be far
cheaper - and probably more reliable (speed, obstacles, whatever0 - to
just make a back door that automatically opened. With backdraft sensor
and automatic lock maybe $200? Dunno, but it sounds more reasonable and
cost-effective than a do-all robot.

-- Gordon

On Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:51:11 -0700, Gordon McComb
--snip--

Think about the early dishwashing appliances (the term "dishwashers"
could be considered ambiguous here <grin!>).  I didn't own one, but
a lot of people bought and used them in spite of having to pre-
rinse, rack, and scrub the really sticky spots first, and kept using
them even when they left egg on forks, warped or melted plastic
dishes, and occasionally broke glassware.

I can't believe that _all_ of those early adopters were simply
enthralled by the technology or concerned with impressing their
neighbors no matter what the cost.  So...  how good _does_ a
"mechanized assistant" have to be to begin selling?

(I should note that I still wash my dishes by hand.)


Frank McKenney
--
    It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to
    serve as a warning to others.
--
Frank McKenney, McKenney Associates
Richmond, Virginia / (804) 320-4887
Munged E-mail: frank uscore mckenney ayut mined spring dawt cahm (y'all)

I think this is still the case. I have a reasonably new dishwasher and I
still can't put dishes, pots, and utensils in that have caked-on crud.
OTOH, when operated properly they use less water and energy, kill off
some extra germs (the water is hotter), and might make a 30 minute job a
10 minute job. I'd say for the $300-400 they cost that's not too bad. No
one would use the things if they had to do all the extra work AND pay
$2,500.

-- Gordon