For every technology success story, there are countless projects that hit a brick wall of reality. Apple's electric car ambitions are one of the most recent, and frankly best, examples of a project failing even when everything seemed to be going well.
The jury is still out on the Vision Pro's ultimate fate, but at least Apple's mixed reality headset shows that the company isn't afraid to keep trying in areas where most other companies have failed. There is. With the Apple Car firmly behind it, the company is reportedly exploring yet another notoriously difficult path: home robots.
This category is both unique and uniquely difficult for a variety of reasons. One thing that sets it apart from other categories is the fact that there is only one success story: the robot vacuum cleaner. It's been 22 years since the first Roomba was introduced, and the entire industry (including iRobot itself) has followed its success for the past two decades.
iRobot's failure to win a second gold medal isn't for lack of trying. It's been almost a quarter of a century since the Roomba was introduced, and it's now used in gutter cleaners, pool cleaners, lawn mowers, and even a Roomba designed specifically to remove screws and other hardware debris from garage floors. has been provided. But despite these efforts, the company was most successful when it focused its resources on robot vacuums.
Image credit: iRobot
Robot vacuum cleaners are successful for the same reasons that previous robots have been successful. It was a product built to perform his single, in-demand task repeatedly to the best of his ability. To this day, vacuum cleaners remain a battleground in the household robot wars. Take Matic, a well-funded Bay Area startup. The former Google/Nest engineer who founded the company believes the next advancement in the home will be built on the foundation of robot vacuums. Part of their case is that iRobot has effectively cornered itself with its pack-like form factor.
These early Roombas weren't built with today's sensing and mapping capabilities in mind. Matic believes that simply making the robot taller will dramatically improve its perspective. This was also the driving force behind the most interesting innovation seen in Amazon's Astro household robot: the periscope camera.
Image credit: Amazon
In reality, the functionality of home robots is greatly hampered by their form factor. The hockey puck design prevalent in robot vacuums isn't ideal for anything beyond the core functionality it was created for. For household robots to more effectively perform the kinds of tasks people might want, the hardware needs to become more complex. Mobile manipulators are excellent moving targets. This means that if you need help, reaching out is a good place to start.
However, like many other things in this world, mobile manipulators are not as difficult as they seem at first glance. In fact, industrial robots have not yet solved this problem. While large bolted arms are common in manufacturing, and wheeled autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) like Locus and Kiva are common in warehouses, the middle ground between the two is not yet firmly established. Is not … This is a big part of why the human element remains important in that world. This problem will be resolved soon, but it seems likely that it will happen with these more expensive industrial machines long before it is introduced into more affordable home robots (in general, companies will (generally have more funds than humans).
This is also a big part of why many people favor humanoid form factors in the workplace (humans do provide a type of mobile interaction, after all). But that's a boring topic for another day.
Image credit: Hello Robotics
Mobile operation is not entirely impossible for household robots. Hello Robot's stretch is perhaps the most convincing example to date. This robot does not have a humanoid shape, but rather looks like a Roomba with a pole attached to the center. This houses both the imaging system and an arm that moves up and down to grab objects (dishes, laundry) at different heights. Of course, some tasks are easier to perform with his two arms. And suddenly you start to understand why so many robotics companies are effectively back-engineering humanoids.
In its current form, the Stretch is prohibitively expensive at $24,950. That's probably a big reason why the company is selling it as a development platform. Interestingly, Matic sees its own robot as a kind of development platform, using vacuuming as a gateway to additional chores.
Another problem with stretching is that it is remote controlled. While tickers are fine in many scenarios, it's hard to imagine people flocking to a domestic robot that's remotely controlled by a human.
Navigation is also an important barrier for housing. Compared to warehouses and factories, homes are relatively unstructured environments. They're all very different, lighting tends to be everywhere, and humans are constantly moving things around and dropping things on the floor.
Matic vacuum cleaners use a series of cameras to map your space and know where you are in your space.Image credit: Matic
The world of self-driving cars faces unique obstacles on this front. But the key difference between an autonomous robot on the highway and one in your home is that in the latter case, the worst you'll probably do is knock something off a shelf. It's bad, but it's rarely fatal. On the other hand, with self-driving cars, any accident would mean a significant setback for the industry. This technology is, perhaps unsurprisingly, held to a higher standard than human technology.
Adoption of self-driving technology has been much slower than many expected, primarily due to the safety reasons mentioned above, but as self-driving cars take over farms and sidewalks, developments for this category Many of the technologies developed are helping to quietly start a robotics revolution of their own.
That's probably a big part of why the company sees home robots as the “next big thing” (as quoted by Bloomberg sources). There's no doubt that Apple is devoting a huge amount of resources to pushing the technology forward. If you can reuse these for another project, it might all be worth it.
Apple is reportedly “not committed” to either a robotic smart screen or a mobile robot, which are said to reside somewhere in the company's Skunk Works, but Apple Home executive Matt Costello has already Brian Lynch is said to be in charge of the hardware side. , John Gianandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, is said to be involved on the AI side.
Image credit: Brian Heater
Given its proximity to domestic efforts, you can imagine the company working on its own version of Amazon's Astro, but that project exists for now as a cautionary tale. This project is hampered by high cost and lack of useful features to justify it. The system also effectively functions as a mobile Alexa portal, making home assistants almost obsolete these days.
Apple has some expertise in robotics, but there's no industrial match for Amazon. The company has been involved in producing robot arms like Daisy, which recovers key metals from discarded iPhones. This is still a pretty big step forward for a home robot.
Perhaps the company could take a more Vision Pro-like approach to this category, focusing more on developer contributions. But that would require a very versatile hardware platform, which would almost certainly be cost-prohibitive for most consumers, making the Vision Pro's $3,500 price point seem like small potatoes.