Three reasons robots are about to become more way useful

MIT Technology Review April 16, 2024
Melissa Heikkilä

We’re inching ever-closer to them being able to handle household tasks.

The holy grail of robotics since the field’s beginning has been to build a robot that can do our housework. But for a long time, that has just been a dream. While roboticists have been able to get robots to do impressive things in the lab, such as parkour, this usually requires meticulous planning in a tightly-controlled setting. This makes it hard for robots to work reliably in homes around children and pets, homes have wildly varying floorplans, and contain all sorts of mess.

There’s a well-known observation among roboticists called the Moravec’s paradox: What is hard for humans is easy for machines, and what is easy for...

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