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Are there any out-of-the-box useful home robots you can buy today, besides the roomba? You turn it on and it does something useful, like vacuuming, with minimal setup. Not toys or general purpose manipulators that you have to work to integrate like a factory automation project.
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We really need a Sirius Cybernetics producing tech that goes beyond “smart” versions of things to full-on robotic versions.
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My definition of robot is that it’s operating decision-making principles shouldn’t be obvious from inspection.
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So a refrigerator that turns a compressor and light on and off using simple sensors isn’t a robot. A rice cooker with fuzzy logic is probably where the spectrum starts.
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I think there should be at least one fairly general sensor-actuator pair adapted to an open environment rather than a closed event set. Like camera and mobility. Roomba has IR obstacle detection and mobility.
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Interesting that many near-robots control a contained environment (fridge, bread machine, rice cooker). And temperature, moisture are intensive property scalar measures where a point measure will characterize extensive state of a whole contained, well-mixed space.
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A real robot sees an unbounded containing environment in full 4d: 3 space plus time. Kitchen appliances are really 1.5 d in a bounded space they contain: time and a set of point measures like temperature. Roomba is 3d (2d plus time). Flatland robot.
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The robotics phase shift in factories is a good dividing line. Even high end CNC machines seem qualitatively different from general robotic manipulators. The philosophy of movement is more open-ended and general.
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Nope, they're the same. It's all pre-programmed for both, no dynamic stuff other than calibration / compensation. You can even use the same software to program both of them some times.
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In the ones I’m thinking of, robots work in a more open topology workspace/cell than CNC machines. The programming model is the same but for eg they can get into nooks and crannies with weird workholding like hands while CNC machines afaik work within a controlled volume
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