Thanks to fictional servant robots like C-3PO and Rosie in The Jetsons, we’ve long become accustomed to the notion that, one day, we are all bound to have our own servant robots for dealing with a range of chores. But is this belief really accurate – and how close have we come to seeing genuinely useful helper bots under our roofs?
A short history of real servant robots
Science fiction has often proved a reliable harbinger of science fact – and, surely enough, shortly after C-3PO and R2-D2 debuted in the first Star Wars movie in 1977, a number of manufacturers attempted to make robots along the same lines. Except that… well, the resulting machines clearly didn’t quite boast the same level of functionality.
Take, for example, the Omnibot, pictured above, which was made by Tomy in the 1980s and had, as its main feature, an in-built cassette tape player that could record and playback command sequences. More advanced automatons during the same decade were Toyshack’s R.A.D. robots, which could actually carry trays to bring drinks and food. However, as this old commercial shows, they still relied on remote controls, which were probably more cumbersome than simply doing all of the “dirty work” yourself…
We’ve still got a long way to go…
However, given the huge technological strides that have been made in computer hardware and software since the 1980s, should we now have another, more serious shot at making proper helper bots? After all, virtual personal assistants like Siri can already fulfil many routine tasks for us. Couldn’t making a useful humanoid robot be just a matter of placing the Siri technology into a shiny and durable humanoid chassis?
Well, not quite. The robotics investor Shahin Farshchi has outlined several lingering obstacles to making decent robot household assistants – including mechanical manipulators yet to match the effectiveness of human hands, and the hefty financial expense of the sensors that would be necessary for the robots. He has implied that there could still be a considerably lengthy wait before such robots become commonplace – citing the analogy of the Ford Model T car, which was not invented until decades after the first automobile.
Our iPhones and iPads: the only “robots” that we need?
However, Farschchi also suggests another intriguing idea: that we might not need robots like these after all. Now that we can, for example, use Apple Pay to quickly order food to be delivered to our homes, do we really need a robot to instead make and present food for us? At least for the time being, the answer could be a fairly straightforward “no”. Perhaps helper bots are one part of science fiction now destined to stay that way…
