It was to highlight that this really isn't the "do everything" robot that it's being advertised as that some are assuming it will be.
> The Roomba or any of the autonomous grass mowing robots
> can't do any of the things you mention either, and yet
> they are commercially successful in the consumer world.
No, but they are significantly cheaper single purpose robots that do their intended tasks well. This is aiming to be a more generic robot that does everything badly, at a much higher cost.
> there is a lot of potential here despite of the
> limitations
Well, the problem for researchers beforehand wasn't a lack of nice robot platforms to use. Some robotic arm controlled by a laptop on some wheels will already get you quite a lot of this functionality.
Really what a lot of researchers want is a nice framework that already offers a bunch of functionality they don't want to program themselves, so they can work on the more exciting cutting edge stuff. It needs to be robust enough to allow them to hack on random research hardware.
The Pepper robot falls slightly short on this for example, as many places have purchased one hoping it could be a robotic PoS/mobile FAQ - in reality it was just a mostly buggy experience for consumers.
I had a look at the code, it seems to run ROS, offer some possibilities, but I couldn't see at a quick glance some high level functionality they could hack on top of (although I could have missed it).
It was to highlight that this really isn't the "do everything" robot that it's being advertised as that some are assuming it will be.
> The Roomba or any of the autonomous grass mowing robots
> can't do any of the things you mention either, and yet
> they are commercially successful in the consumer world.
No, but they are significantly cheaper single purpose robots that do their intended tasks well. This is aiming to be a more generic robot that does everything badly, at a much higher cost.
> there is a lot of potential here despite of the
> limitations
Well, the problem for researchers beforehand wasn't a lack of nice robot platforms to use. Some robotic arm controlled by a laptop on some wheels will already get you quite a lot of this functionality.
Really what a lot of researchers want is a nice framework that already offers a bunch of functionality they don't want to program themselves, so they can work on the more exciting cutting edge stuff. It needs to be robust enough to allow them to hack on random research hardware.
The Pepper robot falls slightly short on this for example, as many places have purchased one hoping it could be a robotic PoS/mobile FAQ - in reality it was just a mostly buggy experience for consumers.
I had a look at the code, it seems to run ROS, offer some possibilities, but I couldn't see at a quick glance some high level functionality they could hack on top of (although I could have missed it).