The Robot Revolution.
Coming Soon: Flexible Home Robots?
If you have seen Boston Dynamics ‘Spot’ robot, then you have seen an early view of the future. Except ‘spot’ costs around US$75,000, making it an unrealistic view of what is coming for consumers.
Spot was never intended to be a volume product, but Unitree has other plans and the Unitree A1 brought the price down to below US$12,000 Just 1 year later, the A1 has now been followed by the Go1 starting from US2,700.
You can see the trend here; these robots are still at the ‘bleeding’ edge with prices plummeting and applications being more in the ‘novelty’ category.
In 2017, we first wrote about the Chinese startup Unitree Robotics, which had the goal of “making legged robots as popular and affordable as smartphones and drones.” Relative to the cost of other quadrupedal robots (like Boston Dynamics’ $74,000 Spot), Unitree’s quadrupeds are very affordable, with their A1 costing under $10,000 when it became available in 2020. This hasn’t quite reached the point of consumer electronics that Unitree is aiming for, but they’ve just gotten a lot closer: now available is the Unitree Go1, a totally decent looking small size quadruped that can be yours for an astonishingly low $2700.
Alt Humans
Robots are approaching mainstream affordability, or a least matching drones and high-end mobile devices in price, but they don’t really do much yet. The next step, which will bring the volume to further reduce prices, is making them useful.
Home appliance maker Samsung acquired Boston Dynamics in early 2020, and clearly, they and many Chinese start-ups will be working on making robots useful to create volume demand. A lot more software is still needed, and some form of arm and hand or grasping mechanism is needed take over tasks around the home, but within 5 years a lot can happen.
A Start: Early Steps.
‘Soon’ will likely be 5 years from now at least, but in the meantime, we have some special purpose robot devices, including vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, window cleaners and more. I will look into some of these others, but a common factor is that these ‘maintenance’ robots generally reduce the effort to complete a task, but not of them at this time replace a human, as they cannot do all aspects of the task. A robot vacuum, operating on a schedule in a home with no steps, can be quite automated, but there are still corners, edges, nooks and other areas it can’t vacuum. There is still manual maintenance, removing hairs, getting rid of the waste from robot or – station and other tasks.
We need to get to the point where robots are more adaptable in the same way humans are, which could enable one robot to be do be capable of a wide range of tasks, in more the manner of a legged version of the ‘handy’, and them making uses of other devices as tools to get things done before we have full autonomy.
Are current robots useful?
No current domestic robot takes over an entire task.
Robot vacuums are one of the most established examples. A human cleaner will get their own supplies, and will move things prior to vacuuming, and also clean the corners, edges, nooks and crannies a robot vacuum can’t reach.
Every specialised robot requires some degree of setup and maintenance beyond what is required to do the same things without the robot. The key to the value of the robot is that trade off.
Robot vacuums still need emptying even if it is from a base, even the best still need other Maintenace such are the removal of any build up from around the rollers, and the very fact they have consumables.
The Future: What is coming?
No current robot vacuum can climb stairs, fully maintain itself, detect when and where vacuuming is really needed, or even do all the vacuuming. How do we get there? I will add some thoughts in the coming months.
Conclusion.
Robot vacuums have arrived. What is next? I have also tried a robot window cleaner, and even a robot lawn mower and plan to get around to comments on those, but it is robots based on Boston Robots or Unitree style products that are those with the greatest potential to really make a difference in the years to come.
Updates:
- 2021 Aug 8 : Start with graphic from ‘the Jetsons‘ maid, to Unitree Go1 and T9