Memorial Day Sales Won't Fix What's Wrong With Consumer Robotics

I'll be honest, I opened my inbox this morning expecting news about Fanuc's new controller firmware or maybe something on the Amazon warehouse expansion everyone's been whispering about. Instead I got a dozen emails about Memorial Day sales on iPads and Apple Watches.

Look, I'm not here to tell you how to spend your money. If you want a discounted tablet, go nuts. ZDNet has a roundup of the usual suspects: Apple, Samsung, Hisense, Ninja. Fine products, I'm sure. But it got me thinking about something that's been bugging me for a while now.

Where are the consumer robots? Not the Roombas (which, credit where it's due, iRobot got right back in 2002 and has been iterating on ever since). I mean the home robots we were promised at CES year after year. The ones that were supposed to fold laundry, fetch beers, help grandma up the stairs. Every Memorial Day, every Black Friday, every Prime Day, I see the same categories on sale: phones, tablets, headphones, TVs. The closest we get to robotics is maybe a discounted robot vacuum or a drone.

When I was at Kuka, we used to joke that consumer robotics was "five years away" every single year. That was 2008. It's still five years away, apparently.

The problem isn't the hardware anymore. That's what people outside the industry don't understand. When I started, a six-axis arm cost what a house costs. Now you can get a decent cobot for under $30,000. The sensors have gotten cheaper. The actuators have gotten better. I called my old colleague at Siemens last month, and he said their motion control costs have dropped something like 60% in real terms since 2015. (I didn't verify that number, so take it with a grain of salt, but it tracks with what I've seen.)

The problem is integration. It's software. It's the fact that a home environment is, and I mean this technically, an absolute nightmare. Factories are controlled. You know where the parts are. You know the lighting. You know the floor is level. A family kitchen? Good luck. Toys on the floor, weird shadows, the dog, a toddler who moves unpredictably. I've seen million-dollar industrial systems choke on less.