We’re an aging society, with a shortage of young-ish people to do the work, paid and unpaid, of helping others get through life. (Immigration crackdowns will make this shortage more acute.) Inevitably, robots are coming to help us in the home.
Maybe they’ll be 5-foot, 8-inch tall imitation people, as Elon Musk predicts. But arms, legs and torsos are expensive to build, complex to operate and kind of frightening/creepy. So in the years just ahead home robots will likely be simpler devices. They’ll be designed to do useful jobs in their own robot way, not imitate a person doing the job in a human way.
But how do you make robot that’s actually helpful, that people will want to use, that doesn’t cost a fortune? What’s the right balance between versatility and simplicity? Who gets to decide what “helpful” means? How do engineers – always eager to do cool never-before-seen things – find common ground with us civilians, who want something that will work without confusing us, frustrating us or scaring us?
Charlie Kemp has been thinking about those questions for a long time. Formerly a professor at Georgia Tech, he’s now CTO at Hello Robot, which makes Stretch, 50-pound mobile manipulator that has been used for many more purposes than its creators imagined when they started. These include farming tomatoes, running physical therapy exercises and finding missing stuff. The background visual for this episode is another use: It’s a photo of Henry Evans, who is quadriplegic, using a Stretch to play with his granddaughter.
Users have also taught engineers that they sometimes want a robot to do much simpler things than the robot makers thought of. For example, being able to scratch an itch via robot can give a paralyzed person more autonomy, and makes for one less request for help to a human caregiver.
We talked about this and other lessons from real-world uses – and about the near and farther future of assistive robots. Give a listen!
As always, the transcript here is AI-generated and may contain errors.
Sometimes You Just Need a Robot to Scratch That Spot You Can't Reach