Why robots still cannot do the dishes: contact, cost and generality
Russ Tedrake, Robert Playter, Marc Raibert and Kate Darling explain that touching and handling the physical world remains far harder than language, and that general-purpose machines are expensive to make reliable. It tempers predictions that household robots will follow quickly behind chatbots.
Why can robots still not do the dishes? Show answer
Handling objects means making and breaking contact with the world, which is where control methods, sensing and training data are weakest. Cost and reliability add to the problem.
Why is contact so hard for robot control, according to Russ Tedrake? Show answer
Contact is discontinuous, so methods built for smooth systems break down. The number of possible contact configurations also explodes combinatorially.
Why are household objects a perception problem? Show answer
Many have no simple state to estimate. Tedrake asks what the state of a shirt is, and notes that chopping a carrot turns one object into a hundred pieces.
What does Tedrake call the real challenge for a home robot? Show answer
Validation: gaining enough confidence in a system of learned perception, controllers and planners to ship it into anybody's kitchen.
What is the curse of a general-purpose robot, in Robert Playter's words? Show answer
It is not perfect at any one thing, though it can do many things and cope with uncertainty.
What is Playter's survival rule for robot companies? Show answer
A company that sells only hundreds of robots will commercially fail. It has to sell in the thousands.
Why does Boston Dynamics sell to industry and not to homes? Show answer
Its machines cost a hundred thousand dollars or more. Industry can afford that, and Playter says no consumer will buy a robot at that price.
How many tries did the video of Atlas climbing three big steps take? Show answer
109 tries over about six weeks, with collapses, perception misses and hardware failures.
Why does Marc Raibert say homes are harder than woods? Show answer
Indoors a robot cannot leave scuff marks or bang into walls.
Why does the method behind chatbots not transfer to physical skill, according to Fei-Fei Li? Show answer
AI learns from patterns in very large datasets, and there is no comparable record of physical handling to learn from.
Where do the experts disagree about humanoid robots? Show answer
Tedrake says the best argument for them is that the world is built for the human form. Darling calls the humanoid form overhyped and prefers building environments and machines that suit each other.
What should you ask when you see a robot demonstration? Show answer
How many attempts it took, whether failures were shown, and what the robot touches and with what.