Okay, that made me chuckle. As someone[1] who has also predicted the opportunity for hobby robots based on my experience with home computers. And yet that has really never materialized. I mean there are common household robots today, things like Roombas and robot lawn mowers, but the whole "app" ecosystem, a robot that can do lots of different things, Etc. is still not in the cards. Part of that has to do with how insanely hard vision to inverse kinematics is, "fuzzy logic" was going to fix that before, now "AI" is the buzzword of choice, but realistically you need a lot of things to go right to make this work.
Back in the day we had everyone in the club set some goals for their robot, mine were simple; on voice command, have my robot go to a special refrigerator, get out a cold Diet Dr. Pepper, replace it with one from stock, then bring the cold one to me, where ever I was in the house.
Even allowing for a lot of customized environment to support the robot that is a really high bar today (much less in 1998 when I was thinking I'd have it working by the early 2000's)
End effectors, vision, custom fridge that an open electonically on demand with structured storage to hold beverages in pre-specified places, etc etc. I could probably get a lot closer.
Of course my eldest child could do that at 3 years old without any programming at all and no custom engineering of the appliances. So some things seem effortless for people are really challenging for computers.
[1] I was President of the Home Brew Robotics Club (hbrc.org) for 10 years around the turn of the century (after Dick Prather had been President for 10 years and before Wayne Gramlich became President for 10 years :-)
In 1977, a company named Quasar Industries demonstrated a household robot claimed to understand a vocabulary of 4000 words and capable of vacuuming, washing dishes, and teaching the children of the household French. It would ship within the next two years, at a cost of $4000.
Some CMU graduate students attended one of the demos, and discovered two people discreetly loitering in the background, one doing the "speaking" of the robot, and the other remote controlling it.
Luckily in today's more advanced times, we have Optimus shipping any day now, which definitely has never been teleoperated at any of its demos…
Back in the day we had everyone in the club set some goals for their robot, mine were simple; on voice command, have my robot go to a special refrigerator, get out a cold Diet Dr. Pepper, replace it with one from stock, then bring the cold one to me, where ever I was in the house.
Even allowing for a lot of customized environment to support the robot that is a really high bar today (much less in 1998 when I was thinking I'd have it working by the early 2000's)
End effectors, vision, custom fridge that an open electonically on demand with structured storage to hold beverages in pre-specified places, etc etc. I could probably get a lot closer.
Of course my eldest child could do that at 3 years old without any programming at all and no custom engineering of the appliances. So some things seem effortless for people are really challenging for computers.
[1] I was President of the Home Brew Robotics Club (hbrc.org) for 10 years around the turn of the century (after Dick Prather had been President for 10 years and before Wayne Gramlich became President for 10 years :-)