Apple’s electric car’s loss may be home robots’ gain

For each technology A success story. There are countless projects that collide with the wall of reality. Apple’s electric car ambitions are one of the latest – and frankly, best – examples of a project failing even though everything seemed to be going well.

The jury’s still out on the Vision Pro’s ultimate fate, but at the very least, Apple’s mixed reality headset shows that the company isn’t afraid to keep trying where almost everyone else has failed. With the Apple Car firmly in the rearview, the company is said to be exploring another notoriously difficult path: Home robots.

This class is uniquely unique and challenging for a number of reasons. The only thing that sets it apart from other categories is the fact that there is one success story in particular: the robot vacuum. It’s been 22 years since the Roomba was first introduced, and for the past two decades, an entire industry (including iRobot itself) has been gunning for that success.

iRobot’s inability to strike gold a second time isn’t due to a lack of trying. In the nearly quarter-century since the Roomba was introduced, it has given us gutter cleaners, pool cleaners, lawn mowers, and even a Roomba specifically designed to remove screws and other hardware debris from garage floors. Despite these efforts, the company achieved its best results when it focused its resources back on its robotics vacuum.

The robot vacuum cleaner succeeded for the same reason that any robot has ever succeeded: it was a product that was designed to perform a single, frequently required task to the best of its ability. To this day, vacuum cleaners are the battleground of the home robot wars. Take, for example, a well-funded Bay Area startup. The former Google/Nest engineers who founded the company believe the next breakthrough in the home will be built around robotic vacuum cleaners. Their case, in part, is that iRobot has effectively painted itself into a corner with its disc-like form factor.

These early Roombas were not created with today’s sensing and mapping capabilities in mind. Matich believes that by simply making the robot taller, you can dramatically improve its vantage point. This was also the motivation behind the most interesting innovation found in Amazon’s home robot Astro: the periscope camera.

Image credits: Amazon

The fact is that the functionality of a home robot is strongly influenced by the form factor. The hockey puck design prevalent across robotic vacuums is not ideal for anything beyond the basic function for which it was designed. To effectively perform more of the types of tasks people might want in a home robot, the devices will have to become more sophisticated. Mobile jugglers are a great moving target. That means, if you want a helping hand, a helping hand is a good place to start.

However, like many other things in this world, mobile phone manipulators are deceptively difficult. In fact, industrial robots have not been able to solve this problem yet. Large bolt-on arms are common in manufacturing, and wheeled autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) like Locus and Kiva are common in warehouses, but common ground between the two has not been firmly established. This is a big part of why the human element remains important in this world. It’s a problem that will be solved soon enough, but it seems likely that it will happen with these more expensive industrial machines before they make their way into more affordable home robots (as a rule of thumb, companies generally have deeper pockets than people).

This is also a big part of the reason why many are championing the human form factor in the workplace (humans, after all, offer a form of mobile manipulation). But that’s a long-term thought piece for another day.

Image credits: Hello robots

Manipulating mobile devices isn’t entirely beyond the reach of home robots. Hello Robot’s Stretch is probably the most convincing example at the moment. Instead of being human-shaped, the robot looks like a Roomba with a pole mounted in its center. This device has a shooting system and an arm that moves up and down to hold objects (dishes, laundry) at different heights. Of course, some tasks can be accomplished more easily using two arms, and suddenly you begin to see why so many robotics companies are retroactively engineering humanoid robots.

In its current form, the Stretch is expensive at $24,950. This is likely a big part of why the company is selling it as a development platform. Interestingly, Matic views its robot as a kind of development platform, using the vacuum cleaner as a gateway to doing extra household chores.

Another problem with the expansion is that it is operated remotely. There’s nothing wrong with teleoping in many scenarios, but it seems unlikely that people would flock to a human-controlled home robot in a remote location.

Mobility is another major hurdle for a homemaker. Compared to warehouses and factories, homes are relatively unstructured environments. It varies greatly from one to the next, as lighting tends to be all over the place and humans are constantly moving things and dropping things on the ground.

Matic Vacuum uses an array of cameras to map spaces and understand where they are located. Image credits: Matic

The world of autonomous driving has faced its own hurdles on this front. But the main difference between an autonomous robot on the highway and one at home is that the worst the latter can do is knock something off the shelf. This is bad, but rarely fatal. On the other hand, for self-driving cars, any accident represents a huge step backwards for the industry. It is perhaps understandable that this technology is held to a higher standard than its human counterpart.

While the adoption of autonomous driving technologies is far behind the curve that many expected, largely due to the safety reason mentioned above, many of the technologies developed for this category have quietly helped launch their own robotics revolution, as self-driving vehicles have taken over Farms and docks.

This is likely a big part of the reason why home robots are considered “the next big thing” (to quote Bloomberg, citing its sources). There’s no doubt that Apple has poured a huge amount of resources into driving technology. If it can be repurposed in a different project, maybe it won’t all be in vain.

While reports indicate that Apple has “not committed” to either the robotic smart display or mobile robot that is said to exist somewhere within the company’s business, it has already positioned Matt Costello and Brian Lynch, Apple Home executives, on the hardware side of things. , while senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, John Gianandrea, is said to be involved in the AI ​​side of things.

Image credits: Brian Heater

Given the proximity of its domestic efforts, one can imagine the company working on its own version of Amazon’s Astro — though that project currently exists as a cautionary tale for now. The project was bogged down by the high cost and lack of useful features to justify it. The system also works effectively as a mobile Alexa gateway, and home assistants have become largely out of fashion as of late.

Apple has some Expertise in robotics – although nothing comes close to what Amazon has on its industrial side. The company has been involved in producing robotic arms like Daisy, which rescues key metals from discarded iPhones. This is still a very big leap for a home robot.

Perhaps the company could take a more Vision Pro-like approach in this category, which places a greater emphasis on developer contributions. However, doing so would require a versatile hardware platform, which would almost certainly be too expensive for most consumers, making the Vision Pro’s $3,500 price seem like small potatoes.