Why not? I would love to have a set of arms that could flip the laundry from the washer to the dryer and then take it out of the dryer and fold it and put it in the basket.

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Schiendelman 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I understand that particular use case sounds cool! I really do.

And then you want them to put away your dishes, and they can't, even though it's just a software update, because they're across the house. And they're BIG, so you don't have room to store two anyway.

And they were $20,000, so...

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stickfigure 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Back around the turn of the (20th) century, electric motors were expensive. It was not uncommon to buy one motor that could do multiple things, like this vacuum/grinder/buffer/blower/pulley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw_8FWJuSho

If we start making robot arms at scale, they're going to get cheap.

I'm also not sure people are really going to want bipedal robots walking around their home, blocking the hallways, recording you in your underwear, etc.

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Schiendelman 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, an electric motor is like 10cm on a side. A set of robot arms that can fold laundry are like a 100cm cube. Most people aren't going to have space for two of them.

And the arms need cameras too...

	▲	stickfigure 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A washer+dryer is pretty huge already. Seems like it could get some robot arms without changing the form factor dramatically. That said, I think this is way farther off than anyone thinks. I want to know what the maintenance schedule looks like for robot arms. Looks like a lot of small moving parts. Probably a lot of plastic gears. In an industrial setting, sure, maintenance is just an expense. But wheels require less maintenance and factories can be designed around the robots.