iRobot Stock is Pure Play for Smart Home Robotics

If hardware is hard, then smart home robotics is nearly impossible. There are plenty of theories about why people have been slow to adopt robots into the home, aside from the obvious fear-driven Terminator narrative. The most obvious one is that the existing robots don’t do anything more efficiently or effectively than even a teenager – at least not at a price point that makes sense. The unstructured home environment and technological challenges also make it difficult to design a functional smart home robot capable of multiple tasks, like cooking dinner, washing dishes, and bagging rubbish. Most home robots today are mostly gimmicks, except maybe robotic companions for the elderly. That’s what led a co-founder of Apple to come up with “the coffee test,” one way to tell that humans have finally achieved artificial general intelligence.

A machine is required to enter an average American home and figure out how to make coffee: find the coffee machine, find the coffee, add water, find a mug, and brew the coffee by pushing the proper buttons.

Credit: Steve Wo