alt Hacker NewsI'm not so sure. If you could rebuild every human space and tool from scratch, you are probably right. However, we live in buildings filled with stairs. We've got tall cabinets with things tucked in them. We've got lawn mowers and snow blowers and leaf blowers and cars. Making a humanoid robot is a much harder problem if you want a cool demo. If you actually want to deploy robots in billions of homes, it might just be the only answer.
Replies
Why not just robo-dog? They can go pretty much everywhere a human can. You just add a strange neck/arm thingy as head and it can do pretty much everything. It's not accident that that became one of the best known robots.
Just have to be compatible?
The xiaomi-robotics-1 concept is but one that seems very doable and very near term.
Rebuilding and replacing tools doesn't sound that big of an issue to be honest.
I'm starting from the assumption the vast majority of people won't want a robot in their home, even just on principle. Then most people will not need it to do every possible action an human does.
For the remaining people in the target, having adapted/compatible cabinets or furniture is probably less of an issue. If someone requires assistance for instance, they'll probably also don't want hard to access shelves or crazy weird stairs.
The same way people have started choosing furniture that can accommodate a roomba(RIP irobot), we'll adjust our newer homes to whatever makes sense when we get the next wave of home robots.