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Comment by ph0rque | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure I'm not the first/only one to have this idea, but to make the robot systems much cheaper, why not have an ecosystem of smart objects, and the robot itself much simpler? For example, for the food preparation industry, have all that food be in smart containers (self-weighing, able to dispence discrete amounts, chemical sensors to determine "freshness" of the food, if applicable). Is anyone aware of such systems, or perhaps working on them as part of a startup?

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We couldn't even convert to the Metric system in America, I'm not saying its impossible but if you can't point to a clear benefit from it, why incur the cost?

I also think that right now the cost of robotics comes from the complexity of the software more so than the hardware. We have plenty of commodity hardware, and the actual robotics chassis/effector/sensor stuff is not all that expensive in perspective, but the software is a giant tangled mess of projects that do the same thing in different ways. (At least on the open source side). There have been moves lately to fix that, like the Gearbox project, but overall it is still a lot of people spending a lot of time reinventing the wheel.

The aggregate system of simpler machines will still need to get the task done. It's still a hard problem, no matter how you slice it. Systems probably also are less able to operate in human environments.

But one big trend in robotics is simpler robots that can solve part of the problem. We don't have butler robots, or systems of robots that are as capable as butlers, but we do have roombas & scoobas.

I've thought about such systems when hunting for startup ideas, but the snag that I kept coming across was: how do you convince people that they need all of these other 'smart objects' in addition to the people need to mesh the variety of smart objects.

On the other hand, most large manufacturers use robotic systems in the actual production of goods.

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