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Asked by anon-379336 on 19 Jan 2024.
Question: Would robots have enough intelligence to do human jobs at home such as cooking or cleaning the house?
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Arunav Das answered on 19 Jan 2024:
I love this question as it could be seen from two different perspective – knowledge and dexterity required to manage household tasks.
There are already robot vacuum cleaners (example Roomba and Dyson robots) and some of the current research is focussing on tidying up a room. Equally, there are robots that can cook fast food and a three course meal . The question is – could the same robot do everything in the house like cooking, cleaning and tidying up. We do not seem to have such a robot today because the complexity of mobility and dexterity required in a house or flat because they all have varying dimension of rooms and kitchen area including electric vs gas cooker setups.
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Gerard Canal answered on 19 Jan 2024:
For cleaning in a multi-purpose way (i.e., the same robot doing different tasks such as mopping, vacuuming, dusting in different surfaces…) robots need different kinds of “intelligences” and abilities.
For instance, they need spatial intelligence to understand what is in the space and the different objects that are there, but also to know how to interact with different objects (i.e., how to grab a mop) and so on. Currently, all these processes require a lot of computation which makes it very hard for robots to do these tasks in a human-like way, and they often fail to achieve the task.
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Carl Peter Robinson answered on 21 Jan 2024:
Cleaning: whether you will get an all-in-one robot to do all the different types of cleaning remains to be seen. You’re going to need an intelligent control system that can recognise the different types of robotic actions required for the different types of cleaning (e.g., vacuuming, wiping down surfaces, dusting). On top of that, such a robot would need several types of tooling and manipulator to achieve such tasks, as well as being able to move around the house effectively to perform each cleaning activity. For example, we have robot vacuum cleaners now, all following the same design of being small, wheeled devices that drive around floors sucking up dirt. But what about the stairs? That particular design is not effective there; I guarantee the companies that make these devices are working on legged robots to overcome such issues. And that’s the crux of it. I think a successful cleaning robot would have to be legged and have very dextrous “upper limb” end effectors (“hands” in effect).
Cooking: I am dubious of this. I guess if it’s production line style cooking where specific tastes aren’t involved, it could be possible. But so much of cooking is reacting to what is going on by smelling, tasting, and observing. Whether we get that level of robot cook, I am not so sure for now.
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