Robots at home: a reality not yet such real
During the last years, the robotic industry has investigated the use of robot in domestic applications with the aim of finding the "killer application", that mean the product that is needed in each house and that becomes indispensable with the objective of give life to a large-scale mass production comparable to the automotive sector.
However, until now there are only a few systems that have had some success, such as iRobot's Roomba vacuum cleaner, capable of cleaning floors and carpets from interiors of homes.
Currently, there are several reasons why these technologies have not yet reached their peak, including:
The difficulty of developing sufficiently intelligent and agile systems that manages to do tasks easily and with high precision.
The autonomy of the systems is still quite limited and reduced. This problem is also linked to the complexity of the robot, since as we introduce more actuators and sensors to perform tasks more accurately, at the same time we introduce other sources of energy consumption that indirectly affect or may affect autonomy.
As the production and sale of these systems is not very high, it is observed that the development and commercialization costs are very high.
Therefore, we still have a long way to go, until the robotic systems are a massive reality and each one of us can have one of them in each home.
wow