Making a "useful" robot
iRobot, the makers of the Roomba robotic vacuum, makes a product that looks similar to the Roomba but is designed for people to develop robots, the iRobot Create. I’m glad to see that the makers of one of the few “useful” robotic products on the market is encouraging people to delve into robotics and try to come up with the next “useful” robot.
Besides price, I think one of the obstacles to there being more consumer-level robotic products on the market is that people have too many pre-conceived notions of what a “useful” robot would look/act like. We have been fed most of these ideas through television and movies. Unfortunately, it seems like most of the money used to research and develop robots is aimed at making a humanoid robot. Though human behavior and personality may be the ultimate challenge to emulate in a robot, there are an infinite number of different robots that could be made to simplify household tasks that wouldn’t necessarily look like or act like a human or part of a human.
Besides, having human characteristics, I think people are confining their idea of a “useful” robot to one that can handle many tasks. However, the cost (I know I said “besides price” earlier) of developing a machine or a robot that can handle many different tasks is very prohibitive. For instance, the company I work for just built a machine to press railroad wheels onto railroad axles (then, press on bearings but that’s beside the point). At first, we were going to have to be able to handle several different axle lengths, but our customer eventually narrowed the variation to two axle lengths. Trying to design a machine that could handle so much variation was quickly becoming very expensive. Was it possible to design such a machine? Yes. Was it a good idea? No. If, like the iRobot Roomba, a robot is designed to handle one task, the price of that robot quickly drops.
Even though I eliminated it as an option, price is a prohibitive factor in the proliferation of household robots. However, that issue is continually being resolved. As with any technology, the prices of components are slowly dropping. Hopefully soon, price may no longer be prohibitive.
