My idea for the next big thing: House Droids

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

If I won the lottery, I’d totally sink money into research and development.

Because, just like the home computer and smart phone, I can imagine the next piece of technology that can become ubiquitous, and indispensable, for everyday living:

The House Droid (or Home Bot, if you prefer)

What does it do? What doesn’t it do?!

I’m thinking of something R2D2 shaped. You can speak to it, and it would come when called. It would also have mapped out the house so it could go where you directed it.

I’d add a trash receptacle and a mini fridge: so you can give it garbage, or retrieve snacks. It’d be a WiFi hub, would play music, and I’d work on projecting video. It’d also have a roomba feature, so it can vacuum and clean floors.

With AI, it would be something you could talk to and ask for information, just like a modern smart speaker.

When you aren’t home, it would be your eyes and ears. You could interface with a camera on your phone to see things inside the home. Since it’s mobile it could go where you want it to. This way, it’s home security, and an interface with anybody inside the home.

At night, it could be home security. Maybe give it a feature that alerts when glass breaks; or a door is opened without authorization (perhaps it has a password feature to disable an alarm).

But that’s just the base. Much like smart phones, once one is developed, lots of people will come up with their own innovations on how to utilize the technology. I’m sure there will be plenty of apps to add to its platform.

But I do think an autonomous robot for the home, which can perform daily functions and provide a remote interface could easily translate into the next big thing, that everybody has.

Your thoughts? Thanks to all who reply.

2

Seriously, my first thought was “Swell, something else I could trip over.”

3

Variations of domestic bots are coming and the probably will be huge, especially with aging populations. With declining birth-rates in wealthier countries, the domestic bots will let older folks who have accumulated money to stay independent longer or just have more free time.

There is a lot of work being done for house cleaning bots currently. Who wins out will be the interesting question.

Many Japanese companies and at least Tesla in the US are working to develop these new appliances.

4

Yeah, that’s what this society needs. A robot that will fetch us snacks as we loll on the couch.

In the year 5555
Your arms hangin’ limp at your sides
Your legs got nothin’ to do
Some machine’s doin’ that for you

mmm

5

But one that cleans toilets and showers, dishes and counters along with the floors. Maybe does the laundry. People would pay $20,000 for such a bot.

In the Year 2525: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic

6

Honda has been developing one called Asimo for years now (Googling, since 2000) and it’s specifically designed as a home health aide. Japan has a growing population of elderly people with few young people available to assist. So I think lots of money is already going to develop such things.

7

As noted above …

As a bright idea for inventors you’re about 40 years too late. And many billion short. A complete hefty Powerball win would disappear into that R&D project without a burp, nor much sign of progress.

Robo cook and housekeeper will be huge. Instead of the top 1% affording such things full time, now the top 15% will.

8

I predict a thread a few years from now called “House Droids are still decades away.”

9

You could call this robot, “Hired Girl,” and no doubt make a fortune. Just be careful about any time travel devices. (The Door into Summer - 1956)

10

No…That’s so 1980’s !!

The first useful household-servant robots will probably reach the consumer market with 20 years or so. But if we’re gonna use old-fashioned movies as our measuring stick, I predict they will look more like C3PIO than R2D2.

And I think most people will prefer to buy a personal droid that looks metallic and C3PIO-ish, more like a machine than a human.

A machine gives you a feeling that you are in control. A realistic human-like android is too creepy for today’s adults.

It will take another generation, till kids who grew up in homes with nerdy, metallic servants feel so
comfortable using them that they will prefer to buy realistic, Bladerunner-style droids.

But of course, there’s one big hole in my prediction: I haven’t mentioned the motivating factor behind modern tech…the all powerful force which propelled the internet beyond nerdy bulletin-board sites and into homes everywhere: porn.
But that creeps me out.
So I’ll leave it for the next generation to go mainstream with android fetishes. :slight_smile:

11

Certainly that’s one aspect to it (sex toys), but I really think the need for household help for the elderly and disabled is going to drive this thing.

12

No, it’s The Plastic Pal That’s Glad to See You.

13

Maybe not all adults. Ever heard of “Real Dolls”?

14

Also, a metallic humanoid simple looks cool; which is in fact important for marketing a consumer product. In fact, that’s a reason for making them humanoid in the first place instead of a rolling box with a bunch of arms.

There’s also the “uncanny valley” to keep in mind; an outright “android” whose behavior is off will creep people out in a way that the same thing from a Threepio lookalike won’t.

And then there’s the issue that for some people a genuinely humanlike mechanical servant would feel too much like owning a slave, regardless of how sentient or not they are. We already see people anthropomorphizing chatbots, after all; it’ll be even easier when the chatbots have bodies.

15

It would cost an enormous amount of money and resources to make a humanoid robot with a realistic face (let alone one where the rest of the body appears to have skin). And given that none of this is necessary for it to be useful, I see no reason to expend the effort.

16

One of the things designers have noticed about robots in general is those intending to work in human spaces and interact with humans generally perform better when they’re roughly the size and shape of humans.

We’ve all experienced this situation with wheelchair users. They are in general much shorter and wider than standing adults. As well, their shoulders are located a lot farther from the edge of their “footprint” AKA shadow. Which renders their horizontal reach all the shorter before we consider their greater need to also reach vertically.

As a consequence a lot of the world designed for standing adults, such as a standard kitchen, is full of obstacles for wheelchair users. And would be full of similar obstacles for an R2-like robot unless equipped with very long tentacles and eyes also on long flexible stalks.

If you want a robot to operate in a standard kitchen, giving it arms and hands and at least a head and torso size and shape approximating an upright adult human is the way to go. As between legs and feet versus some sort of wheeled or tracked base, the challenge is curbs and stairs. There are wheel or track assemblies that can handle those, but they’re inherently more limited than legs and not that much less mechanically complex.

It’s early days yet, and many designs will be tried. Some will succeed in the marketplace. Others won’t.

17

If house droids follow the same business model as smartphones, you will only nominally own them or have any real control over them. They’ll really be the property of the house droid company, and they will really work for the house droid company; or with an easily obtained warrant, the government. And people will let these literal creatures into the privacy of their homes? My smartphone at least I can turn off and stick in a faraday bag when I’m not using it.

18

I watched a program, I think its called UneXplained, William Shatner hosts it.

It was about just this subject. The experts that were on talked more about dog shaped robots and what they are doing with them for war and police use. That will be first.
I mean, look how drones are being used already.

I think personal use bots, of any shape will be not be a common thing for a long long time.

These discussion always remind me of the cartoon where Mickey Mouse lives in a robot controlled house and all manner of things go haywire. Eventually the house spits Mickey out the front door.

I feel like Borg type devices attached to humans will become more widely used.
Til, we humans become the “machine”.

Truly scary.

19

Except that, for some people, that’s a feature, not a bug.

The big issue I have with the OP’s concept is the all-in-one bit. Why? I mean, we already have Roombas and Echos. What’s the benefit of making them the same device? Why have a roaming device that can look in on every room, for security, instead of just a cheap camera in each room? Granted that we don’t yet have machines that can fetch a beer from the fridge, but if we did have one, why should it be the same as any of the other machines?

20

If technology advances to the limit of giving humans the absolute power to do anything that is physically possible, if we reached the point of a Great Krell Machine materializing anything we want by even thinking about it, then if we’re to remain human there will have to be some stops, hopefully self-chosen. My guess would be humanity relying on technology to guarantee life and health, but then embracing as large an amount of do-it-yourself-ism as each person was comfortable with. Like in Star Trek people running restaurants and vineyards as a sort of hobby rather than just letting replicators create everything.