Much smaller robots will co-exist in a world with humans a lot more smoothly than anything human shaped & sized.

I'm not so sure. If you could rebuild every human space and tool from scratch, you are probably right. However, we live in buildings filled with stairs. We've got tall cabinets with things tucked in them. We've got lawn mowers and snow blowers and leaf blowers and cars. Making a humanoid robot is a much harder problem if you want a cool demo. If you actually want to deploy robots in billions of homes, it might just be the only answer.

	▲	tjoff 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Just have to be compatible? The xiaomi-robotics-1 concept is but one that seems very doable and very near term. https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html

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pulvinar an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, once they can be made to quietly jump on to a counter, like a cat.

	▲	mrandish a minute ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> once they can be made to quietly jump on to a counter, like a cat. That would be cool. But also a little scary if it has an onboard AI which, based on it's embodiment, decides to develop a cat-like personality. Pretty sure if my cat had a better world model and long-horizon planning, it would kill me in my sleep.
	▲	bryanlarsen an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They need a way to get onto counters, climb stairs, manipulate objects, et cetera. But all of the necessary capabilities do not need to be self-contained. Humans achieve their amazing flexibility through tool use, and so will robots. And in many cases those tools will be other robots. One robot could boost another onto the counter and then they both could get out of the way, unlike a robot large enough to reach up to the counter.