“The Jetsons” debuted on September 23, 1962. The first episode, titled “Rosey the Robot,” was an origin story of sorts for the title character, describing how the overworked Jane hired the housekeeper. Sixty-two years after her debut, Rosey remains an important pop cultural reference for the unfulfilled promise of domestic robots.
The home of 2024 isn’t necessarily entirely devoid of robots. According to its own figures, iRobot has sold more than 50 million Roombas. That, meanwhile, is a fraction of the total number of robot vacuums that have been sold worldwide. Robot lawnmowers and pool cleaners have also gained ground, although those numbers pale in comparison to their vacuuming counterparts.
The unmet potential of home robots isn’t due to a lack of consumer demand or a lack of effort on the part of manufacturers. It’s more complicated and nuanced than that, though ultimately it’s a question of price, functionality, and effectiveness. Outside of the use cases mentioned above, current home robots either don’t do enough or they don’t do what they do well enough, and building a robot that can fulfill both of those characteristics would prove prohibitively expensive for those of us who can’t afford our own islands.
Vacuum cleaners are good domestic robots
During his long tenure as iRobot’s CEO, co-founder Colin Angle often said that he didn’t become a robotics expert until he became a vacuum cleaner salesman. It’s a fun joke that gets at something much deeper about the industry. Before Roomba came along, the company had been experimenting with everything from baby dolls to military equipment.
iRobot found success when it focused on one simple task: cleaning floors. Early models were primitive by today’s standards, but they did the job well enough to justify their price. In addition to marking 62 years since Rosey’s TV debut, next month also marks Roomba’s 22nd anniversary. The robot vacuum is now old enough to legally buy a box of Sam Adams.
In the nearly quarter-century since Roomba launched, much of iRobot’s research and development has gone into making the system smarter, adding sensing, mapping and artificial intelligence and integrating it with smart assistants. The company has also invested in other robotics categories, including gutter cleaning, pool cleaning and a lawn mower that may never see the light of day, but none have managed to recapture Roomba’s magic.
Balancing work and home
Years ago, I was on a panel to talk about robots. The moment the conversation ended and the Q&A session began, a woman raised her hand and took her place in the middle of the table. She was eager to tell me about her billion-dollar idea: a drone that vacuums, dusts surfaces, and does laundry. I told her it was a great idea and that I would gladly buy one from her when she got it up and running.
In robotics, everything is easier said than done. It’s not that no one before her has come up with the concept of a furniture-cleaning drone, but that no one before her has figured out how to build a reliable, robust, large-scale version at a price that won’t exceed the cost of my 30-year mortgage.
I was reminded of the moment Tesla announced its robot in the shape of a ballerina in a spandex jumpsuit. Elon Musk described a humanoid that would work all day in the factory and then pick up your groceries on the way home, before making you dinner. Musk has been in the public eye long enough to know exactly how much importance should be placed on his schedules.
Before fully functioning Roseys make it into the world, simpler machines will have to lead the way. Robots have been around in industry for decades, but they’ve been designed to do one task well over and over again. The more complex the machine, the more expensive it is, and the more potential points of failure arise. Think of how many ways your Roomba has failed, and multiply that by the complexity of a humanoid.
Most experts agree that the first domestic robots will be designed to perform a few simple tasks: social robots and robots that take care of others and perform household chores. In the near future, each of them will be designed with one or two functions in mind.
Laying the foundation for the robots of the future
There is a sense of frustration that home systems are nowhere near the level expected at this point. What is often lost in that conversation, however, is how much groundwork has already been done. Whoever builds the next great home robot will not have done so in a vacuum.
Their success will be based not only on ongoing research, but also on the domestic robots that came before them. Navigating an environment as unstructured and dynamic as the home probably seemed impossible to many before the first Roomba arrived. Again, it was a simple machine by today’s standards, but it laid the groundwork for what came next.
You can see reflections of this in the current generation of home robots. Take Hello Robot, for example. In terms of design, it is an extremely simple machine: it is an arm attached to a pole connected to a base similar to the Roomba. Its simplicity is partly due to the fact that it is more of a development platform than a product. But systems like this one, or, say, Matic’s robot vacuum cleaner, continue the hard work of building the foundations, whether for mapping, manipulation or navigation.
Antisocial social robots
Social home robots had a rough year in 2019. Anki, Kuri, and Jino all fell in quick succession, each for a combination of price, limited functionality, and reliability. More recently, Amazon’s Astro has been in the dust, effectively crippled after Amazon’s belt-tightening eliminated a significant portion of the company’s consumer hardware roster. Of course, if the $1,600 robot had been a huge hit, the retail giant almost certainly wouldn’t have let it die quietly.
Amazon’s troubles are a friendly reminder that being one of the world’s largest companies does not guarantee success in such a perilous category.
And after the lukewarm reception of the Vision Pro, one wonders if Apple could be following a similar path with its rumored home robot.
A more recent report suggested that the group’s first project could look less like Amazon’s Astro and more like its Echo Show 10. The potential product has been described as something resembling an iPad-like tablet mounted on an arm. These are reports of nascent projects, which could go in many directions, but as things stand, this sounds more in line with the company’s robotic ambitions.
Domestic robots are coming, but when they do, they’ll still have a long way to go. That said, Jane won’t be bringing Rosey home until 2062, so we’ve got time.
