The previous post, Build the Ecosystem, Not Just the Robot, discussed the incredible difficulty of creating a household robot capable of handling typical chores—cooking, cleaning, buying, etc.—that humans may find trivial. Still, their variety makes them devilishly difficult to build and program.
Brains, fingers, feet, eyes, noses, ears, skin, and taste—all attributes humans possess courtesy of nature—are hard to replicate. Even driving a car, a task humans perform with minimal thought, has proven challenging for robots.
Here are examples of solutions.
Automate the Household, Not the Housekeeper
The effort to develop household robots may be aimed at the wrong objective. Rather than trying to create an artificial human capable of performing thousands of unrelated physical tasks, in various environments, it may be far easier to automate the details of the household itself.
The general-purpose robot would become less a maid, cook, gardener and handyman than a butler: a mobile coordinator connecting the human with a collection of specialized automated systems.
A modern automated factory does not ordinarily employ one fantastically capable humanoid robot that walks around welding, painting, machining, inspecting, packing and driving a forklift.
It distributes those functions among machines optimized for particular jobs and coordinates their activities. A highly automated home could operate according to the same principle.
The “Roomba” offers a simple example. One approach to automated floor cleaning would be to teach a humanoid robot to find a vacuum cleaner, grasp its handle, operate its controls, maneuver it around furniture, determine what it has already cleaned, and return the vacuum when finished.
The simpler solution is a vacuum cleaner that moves by itself. The specialized machine needs to understand only its specific job and the part of the environment relevant to that job.
The principle can be extended throughout the house. Don’t give the general-purpose robot a scrub brush and teach it to clean a bathtub; develop a bathtub-cleaning system.
Don’t give it a squeegee and teach it to wash windows; incorporate cleaning mechanisms into the windows or provide a specialized window-cleaning machine.
Don’t teach the robot to mow the lawn; give the lawn its own machine. Don’t teach it to load a dishwasher; automate the entire food-service and cleaning process.
The general-purpose robot—think of it as a butler robot—then doesn’t need thousands of highly refined motor skills. It needs to understand human intentions, communicate those intentions to specialized systems, coordinate their activities, supervise results and deal with exceptions.
Physical manipulation remains useful, but it becomes one capability among many rather than the foundation of household automation.
Consider food shopping. Even sending a robot to a store may preserve an unnecessary human-era activity. If every food item has an electronic identity and the refrigerator and pantry maintain continuous inventories, the house already knows what it contains, how much remains and the household’s historical consumption. It can predict that milk will run out Tuesday afternoon or that only two eggs remain.
Routine shopping therefore can disappear. The household system can compare suppliers, prices, quantities and delivery times and automatically replenish ordinary items within limits established by the resident. The system can refer unusual purchases or significant price changes to the resident for a decision.
The store, which can resemble an “Amazon-style” warehouse, can deliver standardized containers directly to the house’s receiving dock, where refrigerated items are routed to refrigerated storage, frozen foods to frozen storage and dry goods to their appropriate locations.
Inventory would be updated automatically.
No robot needs to drive anywhere. No car needs to park. Nobody needs to walk through aisles. The shopping trip was merely another traditional human task whose underlying purpose—maintaining an appropriate inventory of food—can be accomplished without the task itself.
Meal preparation can be treated similarly. A resident might say, “I want steak, mashed potatoes and peas at six o’clock, with approximately 300 calories and 12 grams of protein.” The butler robot does not peel potatoes or stand over a broiler. It converts the human request into objectives, preferences, constraints, and a deadline, then communicates them to the household food system.
The food system selects appropriate ingredients from inventory, determines quantities, prepares and cooks the components at appropriate times and temperatures, and produces the finished meal.
If the requirements conflict—for example, if the requested steak portion by itself would exceed the calorie limit—the system reports the problem to the butler robot, which asks the resident whether to reduce the portion or increase the calorie limit.
This is where general-purpose artificial intelligence is particularly valuable: between human intention and specialized machinery. The human specifies the desired result. The AI interprets that result, resolves ambiguities, coordinates the necessary systems and reports problems requiring human judgment.
After the meal, there is no reason to assume that the traditional sequence of clearing dishes, loading a dishwasher, unloading it and putting dishes into cabinets must survive. Reusable dishes might move automatically into an integrated cleaning-and-storage system.
Alternatively, dishes and utensils might be fabricated when required from recyclable materials and returned afterward to the material supply. The table itself might be built and programmed to perform some of these functions.
The important point is not which particular solution ultimately prevails. Tasks should not become the one butler robot’s automated task.
The correct first question is not, “How can we build and program this robot to fold laundry?” It is, “What is the objective of folding laundry?” If the objective is to store clean clothing conveniently, perhaps a different storage system eliminates folding altogether. Or at worst, the storage system would be programmed and built specifically to fold laundry, an easier build than trying to do it with an all-purpose robot.
The objective of shoveling snow is not shoveling snow; it is keeping necessary outdoor surfaces usable. The objective of replacing a roof shingle is not manipulating shingles; it is keeping the building weatherproof. The objective of washing a plate is not washing a plate; it is providing a clean surface to eat from.
This suggests a fundamental rule for household automation. Don’t automate the task. Identify the task’s purpose and automate that specific purpose.
The resulting house becomes a network of specialized systems. Cleaning machines, food-storage systems, cooking equipment, laundry systems, waste processors, environmental controls, security equipment, delivery systems, garden equipment, structural monitors and repair systems continually exchange information.
The mobile butler (the primary robot) is one participant in that network, serving mostly as the resident’s general-purpose representative and coordinator.
Information can travel in both directions. The refrigerator can tell the food system that a steak should be used soon. The food system can tell the butler that steak therefore would be a sensible dinner choice. The butler can ask the resident, “How about steak tonight?” A four-word answer can initiate dozens or hundreds of coordinated operations.
The architecture also offers an important reliability advantage. If a single extraordinarily sophisticated humanoid robot performs every household function, that robot’s failure may disable virtually the entire automated household.
In a distributed system, a window-cleaning machine failure means the windows remain dirty until that component is repaired. Food preparation, laundry, floor cleaning, security and package delivery continue functioning.
Specialization also permits incremental technological improvement. A homeowner need not replace a fantastically expensive general-purpose robot because someone has invented a superior floor-cleaning technology. The floor-cleaning component can be replaced independently. The same principle has made industrial automation practical and continuously improvable.
Eventually the distinction between robot and house may become increasingly artificial. The building itself contains sensors, communications, storage, machinery and specialized automated systems. Mobile robots provide those capabilities requiring mobility. Fixed machines provide capabilities that do not require mobility. The intelligence coordinating them may be distributed throughout the system.
The house, in effect, becomes a modular robot, with each replacable module trained for a specific task..
This approach also could make household automation achievable sooner. An artificial human capable of successfully manipulating virtually every object and tool found in an ordinary house presents an extraordinary robotics problem. A coordinated collection of machines, each optimized for a relatively narrow function, presents many smaller and more manageable engineering problems.
The central research objective therefore should not be “Build the perfect household robot.” It should be “Automate the household.”
For every existing household activity, ask three questions.
- What is the actual objective?
- Does the traditional task need to exist at all?
- If it does, should a general-purpose robot, a specialized machine, or the house itself perform it?
The result may be a paradox: a far more automated home that requires a far less capable humanoid robot.
Instead of making a robot sophisticated enough to handle the extraordinary complexity of a house designed entirely for humans, divide the system into tasks and make the whole system sophisticated so the robot doesn’t have to be.
To begin the evolution, relevant industries should coordinate their efforts so they can determine some initial standards. Companies that make stoves, washing machines, windows, roofs, lighting, floor cleaners, building materials, tools, and robots, etc., should begin working together to create the “smart house.”
That is where the future lies, not with an all-purpose robot, but with a society assisted by automation.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
