Comment by stickfigure
2 hours ago
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.
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...
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.