Present Robot Potential?

Easy.

Easy, provided a relatively noise-free environment.

Very, very hard.

Also very hard. :)

Best,

- Joe

You don't need much computing power to clean a toilet or dust the furniture. You do need a very, very robust mechanism to get around the typical house without falling over the cat or bruising up little Timmy. A Pentium 4 can run most off-the-shelf face recognition and speech recognition software.

Why hasn't anyone built and marketed such an obviously useful device? Apart from the difficulty in engineering the thing, there are six billion people on this planet, four or five billion would be happy to have this kind of job for the most minimum of pay. The robot competition would have to clean a lot of toilets before it paid for itself.

-- Gordon

...

Maybe not. If you use the right tool for the job.

An end effector that combines a wet/dry vacuum and a pressure washer would make this workable. Then it's a spray-painting job, which robots do just fine.

Something for cleaning institutional bathrooms in large buildings might be commercially feasible in Japan.

John Nagle

What I'm talking about is a scaled-down version of this:

John Nagle

The dream of the 50's where robots could do all the drudge work failed to predict the existence of cheap labour. Even the best robot comes no where near the cheapness a biological slave.

Those with the means of production or ownership of the resources have no incentative to share those riches and replace cheap labour with machines and thus provide an environment in which better and cheaper hardware could evolve.

-- JC

Alternatively, the toilet bowl itself could be coated with teflon(tm) to make the job itself easier and less dreaded.

-Wayne

That thing is huge! Is that suppose to maneuver around your house?

Joe McKibben

No, the point is that you can combine a pressure washer and a vacuum to clean without using brushes and without flooding the area.

John Nagle

How? I was thinking of possibly having the robot send the image to the desktop and then letting the desktop do some image processing. I have never done this don't know if that is possible.

You need desktop-level processing power, but I'd put it on the robot -- remember, you were asking about something the size of Asimo, which would have plenty of room for a modern desktop computer in its chest. (Look at the size of the Mac Mini from Apple, for example, which is what I have on my desk -- no, that's not a CD player, that's the computer!)

Then, you'd run face-recognition software, maybe something like OpenCV.

Best,

- Joe