These days consumer robotic products are used for everything from toys to home cleaning to global communication. The Roomba vacuum—popularized by the YouTube video in which a cat takes a magical mystery ride—is an example of home maintenance turned robot, while kids’ favorite Robosapien lands at the consumer’s door with preprogrammed dance moves. How many more lovable robots wind up occupying our kitchens and living rooms remains to be seen. Perhaps there’s room for a robot that performs phone number lookup tasks while cooking dinner, or a robot that optimizes your webpage for search engines while doing your laundry. Roboticists would answer optimistically.
On the utility side of consumer robotics, the ConnectR robot is an example of applied virtual telepresence technology. Consumers may use this device to keep an eye on their kids (essentially giving it the role of a hi-tech baby monitor) or conduct meetings with people on the other side of the world. These virtual meetings can potentially take place while the consumer is on the go, as the moveable nature of the device makes it so that the robot follows its owner during a conversation.
On the pricier, more experimental end you have the Anybots project, which is a broad robotics research effort ranging in nature from Segway androids to telemanipulation. The development here seems to have the desired end result of bringing greater mobility to consumer robots.
While more and more tasks become automated due to smartphone technology and other advanced software, it seems likely that if robotics technology continues to grow, physical automation could see the same growth as computational automation. Until then, it’s not known how well consumer robotscan do.
Telepresence robots haven’t even truly hit the market yet because of trepidation over whether or not there is enough of an appetite for consumer robotics to make it something worth vigorously investing in. Toys and basic utilities are one thing: there will always be a market for automated vacuums and small dancing robots. But once you start combining these moveable gadgets with elements of the personal assistant Siri, people get anxious. Perhaps owing to the uncanny valley effect, which makes us ambivalent about or even outright hostile to, simulations of human behavior or appearance, Americans haven’t been as embracing of robotic products as manufacturers initially thought. This is perhaps the reason why the Pleo robotic dinosaur-maker Ugobe recently went
belly up. It’s hard to predict consumption trends in a brand new market.
Only time will tell how quickly consumer robotics are able to evolve from marketplace toys to marketplace utilities. But at the rapid pace with which human tasks are being outsourced to artificial workers, it seems safe to predict robots will have a place in the household someday soon.
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