Y Combinator Shattered My Robot Loving Dreams

Y Combinator Shattered My Robot Loving Dreams(launchpadtoys.com)

31 points by thushan 14 years ago | 17 comments

In other words: software will replace robots when there's no need to have an actual robot, just software. Erm, yes.

When your iPhone can assemble a car, do the dishes, or actually explore Mars, let me know.

daemin 14 years ago | |

It's not necessarily just software that has killed robots. For instance why have a robot to wash the dishes the same way as a human, when you can just pile them into a dishwasher and be done with it?

SoftwareMaven 14 years ago | | |

I'm guessing you don't have four kids. Sometimes, when the dishes have piled up on the counter above the dishwasher, I think a domestic robot would be amazing.

But then I teach my kids "character" by making them wash the dishes they couldn't bother to put in the dishwater.

Really, there are still any places robots can be helpful that software isn't appropriate for. I do think the human-looking robot is DOA, with task-specific robots taking the place they were given by scifi authors.

lwat 14 years ago | |

Meanwhile my Roomba is doing a great job vacuuming my carpet every day while I'm at work.

jjmaxwell4 14 years ago |

Software is incredibly powerful, but it the robotic revolution is still coming. Obviously software cannot explicitly deal with physical objects as easily as a robot can. I mean, you can have software that will find you the cheapest maid service out there and send them to your door while your at work, but the software can't clean your house.

Robots are taking much longer then we first thought because the problems are much harder then we first thought (pg talks about this is one of his essays on AI).

As of right now, humanoid-consumer viable robots are too weird, slow and clumsy to be of real value. Look up some willow garage (google-backed) on youtube for what I mean. But certainly within my lifetime, we will have something that will be able to fold your clothes, do the dishes and cook you breakfast, all before you get out of bed.

It may be nothing like what the writer was thinking of back in the 80's. I could see a set of robotic arms mounted on the ceiling in the kitchen, which could cook, clean, and then get out of the way, resulting in no awkward robot-human interactions. I don't know what the technology will be, but it will be coming.

memset 14 years ago |

Perhaps all of us have our own idea of why, exactly, we found The Jetsons' Rosie useful and appealing. For myself, the appeal is removing the need for a human to do any sort of physical grunt work to perform a task.

With software, I still have to open a browser tab and punch in dates, times, and locations on a webpage. I still have to physically go to the grocery store [1] and redeem the coupons I've purchased.

How about software that takes my email exchange, extracts the agreed-upon travel dates, books the cheapest ticket, and automatically prints out my boarding pass? Ah, it was all software until the printer - robot.

Or something that mines the types of foods and groceries I like, orders them for me, and delivers them to my doorstep? As a grocery store manager, I might want a robot to pick the products off the shelf and transport them to the customer.

I can't Babelfish a conversation I'm trying to have with a friend. I want those translators that they have on Star Trek. Hardware. Hardware which runs software, sure, but how am I supposed to translate Chinese using Babelfish on my cell phone?

I still have to physically scrub and place the dishes from the kitchen sink into the dishwasher. Hell, I even have trouble getting them from my desk to the sink!

So I say let's have more robots! But not robots that substitute for human interaction, but robots that keep us from the monotony of everyday tasks.

[1] http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallac...

angryasian 14 years ago |

for someone that thinks they are creating the future of toys, this is incredibly shortsighted. This post shows a lack of vision. Why would I even want to go to hipmunk, when a robot will get the ticket, pack my bags, make sure they are at the airport where they need to be, and all I'll have to do is board a plane. Aisle50, i don't want just deals, I want someone to either pick them up or deliver them, put them away, and automate this process for me every week.

jdelsman 14 years ago | |

Agreed, and there are many cases where a robot will remember to do such things for me before I will even think about it (artificial intelligence) whereas I may forget to book my ticket, or I may look in my refrigerator at dinner time just to see it is empty.

dkrich 14 years ago |

I think this one's a bit of a stretch.

SoftwarePatent 14 years ago |

Is there a sense in which software is what is holding back robots? We have all watched pretty cool robots in videos rolling around, walk on two legs, etc. What we need is awesome AI to put in the existing hardware. Any experts want to chime in?

mdda 14 years ago | |

I don't claim to be an expert, but from what I've seen there's a typically a huge gulf between the software and hardware.

Until recently, it's been difficult to put a lot of CPU on a mobile robot, so the software developer really has to be a programmer with an embedded systems mindset. For instance, the Arduino is a relatively recent phenomenon, and that's seriously under-powered if you're interested in high-level planning, or vision. But the GumStix or BeagleBoard look interesting, since there's a pretty accessible tool-chain available.

On the hobbyist front, most of the people setting out to build (for instance) humanoid robot kits have a lot of fun with getting the hardware together, but realize that dabbling in software really doesn't get you very far.

For the software-mindset hobbyists (like me), it's a lot more practical to do robot experiments virtually - since as soon as one gets out the soldering iron, the whole weekend disappears instantly.

"Hardware is tough", and (unlike software) iterating the design/plan is extremely time-consuming. OTOH, once a few decent platforms appear (in the $1000 ballpark), I guess software people will swarm in and push things into exponential mode, rather than what seems like linear mode right now.

baalexander 14 years ago | | |

I recently bought a TurtleBot (turtlebot.com), a ~$1,000 robot with a netbook, kinect, gyro, and roomba. The TurtleBot platform combined with the Robot Operating System (ros.org) - a popular, open-source robot framework - is an affordable way to test out and learn many cutting edge robotic algorithms like room mapping and navigation. It even supports telepresence.

I consider myself software oriented too, and recommend it to others who are looking at going beyond a basic microcontroller based robot, but without all the soldering.

nknight 14 years ago | | |

> Until recently, it's been difficult to put a lot of CPU on a mobile robot

Define "mobile"?

Household and other single-site robotics applications should not be severely constrained by the advancement of embedded computational hardware. Wireless transceivers can provide the bridge between the limited embedded systems in the physical-actor hardware in the living space, and the heavy computational hardware in a big box in the closet.

mitko 14 years ago |

best collection of software < having an assistant that does everything + the software.

In the future, why do it yourself, if you can delegate it to a robot and focus on more important things.

majmun 14 years ago |

so maybe it is so. but humans will get API and will act like machine. (until maybe they are replaced by better machine, or parts that make them human are removed.). DNA is machine anyway.

sachinmonga 14 years ago |

I'm still waiting for my android powered android.

wavephorm 14 years ago |

Where has this guy been for the past 20 years? I was child of the 80's, and a teen of the 90's. And it has been pretty clear to me for a long time that the concept of cyberspace and virtual reality would be the eventual endpoint of the computer revolution. Robots always were a 60's thing, even in the 80's.