I dream of Jetsons....

Over the last couple of days, we had around 10-12 inches of snow which I had to shovel. And our driveway is around 40 yards by 10 yards. I had to shovel almost 8 inches a week back. So obviously, I just have
to buy a snow blower which having just moved to the suburbs was never a priority till now.

My idea here is not to bore you with my household chores,but to point out what I feel is a missing piece in the technological landscape.
If you have done any household chores (no..sitting on the couch does not qualify), you will notice that most of it is very repetitive, quite well defined tasks. Some examples are washing, drying and folding clothes, dusting your house, shoveling snow, mowing lawns, vacuuming, refilling kitchen towels and toilet papers, washing, drying and restacking dishes etc.

So big deal, what are humans supposed to do? Be on facebook??
If you have seen a household with both the father and mother working and kids going to school it is simple to realize tha 24 hours is just not enough. By the end of a grueling work day, a mountain of chores remain. Once the chores are done, you are dead tired. So philosophically speaking "what is the point in living?".
So how can the household chore industry be better served? Obviously automation and robotics come to mind. Robotics currently available has kind of underwhelmed me so far. There are solutions, but they have very limited capability, proprietary, expensive and gets outdated pretty quickly. Reminds me of the computer industry in the 80's.. Actually it looks exactly like the computer industry in the 80's.

Ok then what happened to the computer industry that has resulted in such an amazing, diverse environment with so much potential today? And will a similar model work for the household chore industry problem?

It might very well work. Lets see how.
Internet and PC boom happened AFAIK because of these contributing factors:

• Commodity hardware and OS - Wintel kicked ass and democratized PCs, DELL commoditized it further.
• Open Architectures - TCP/IP, HTTP, 8086 ....
• Simple and Powerful Development Languages - simple development languages and environments which enabled powerful apps to be developed with a very low overhead
• Communities - Open Source, Java Platform drove a lot of innovation as developers experimented with various solutions at a very low overhead

The robotics industry has some of it but has yet to become ubiquitous:

• OS - ROS is trying to become the common OS of choice
• Open Architectures - Nope, don’t think so.
• Commodity Hardware – Nope.
• Communities - Not much other than academics and hobbyists

So Robotics industry has a way to go and has to do what the Computer industry did a few decades ago. Microsoft already has a Robotics Development Studio which works on multiple platforms. So the direction is right, however momentum is not there. I think the most challenging aspect is to commoditize the hardware, as developing a multipurpose hardware platform is challenging and is usually a trade secret. Last but not least is to have an amazing robotics application development ecosystem, where specialized robotic applications are developed and sold. This will enable the robot to evolve into a powerful platform.

Imagine the day when you would install the dishwasher software in your multipurpose robot and it starts to wash dishes...I believe it is possible and the world needs it right now.

Reference: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327206.300-robots-to-get-their-own-operating-system.html