the real problem with household robots is that they are either flimsy toys or dangerous machines, and there's not much in-between. If we were to build a humanoid robot that would just put laundry away (as described in a HN article a few weeks ago), it would need to be strong enough to lift a laundry basket, have advanced control systems to go up and down stairs, and also be safe/reliable/trusted enough not to hurt people or damage property. We can do these things (modulo the trust, probably) but the confluence of all of it gets very expensive very quickly.
People want Rosie from the Jetsons, but the compute power required would be astronomical, the mechanical systems would need maintenance, and there would be real safety concerns.
With LLMs, we've got the wisecracking figured out...
It's not expensive, it's an unsolved problem, the main issue for many years has been the modeling of cloth behavior. They already have a folding robot that means they have solved a significant chunk of it.
But the generalization of behaviors is also a large problem. Pick and place is mostly solved I believe, but translating your housework to pick and place in your apartment is still a bit off.
I'm not convinced safety is solved: given how often LLM's hallucinate and automated cars get confused, what happens when something unusual happens and the robot thinks a person's arm needs to be "folded" and breaks it? Or a person's clothing looks like the wall and a robot tries to move their arm through a person's chest?
Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to unpredictable humans means there are unlimited edge cases... if a humanoid robot is strong enough to do something useful it is also strong enough to be dangerous.
Even simple dangers like pinch points on joints or not stepping on curious pets are an issue.
My son would adore a humanoid robot around the house, but could I leave him unsupervised around it?
Recent example in the news:
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-chess-playing-robot-grabs-and...