[magusdei]

Yeesh, gwern. Usually I enjoy your comments, but this one seems a bit unfair. Of course if you want to know the long-term future of robotics, you should look to sci-fi authors and research prototypes. But if you want to know the short-term future (<10 years), you should listen to people with actual experience building actual products, even if you don't see those products as impressive from a research perspective.

I think the article provides an illustrative example of the different factors and complications that make it so difficult to go from a research prototype to an actual consumer product (a process which seems to take about 20 years on average). As usual, the lackadaisical improvement of battery technology is one of the central bottlenecks.

Of course, if your main interest is industrial robotics, where DRL approaches are more likely to become mainstream in the near-term, insights related to consumer products might not be as relevant. But note that industrial improvements, while important, will be mostly invisible to consumers except in terms of prices, unemployment and increased customization options for products.

Even then, the article can provide some perspective. Our processes (whether assembly lines or household vacuuming) are already highly optimized for a particular way of doing things, and researchers in particular tend to underestimate the amount of effort it takes to change systems to accommodate a slightly different method. So any new system not only has to be competitive with the existing one in just about every parameter, it has to justify the often huge costs of small alterations to the process. Thus, even in industry, getting to mainstream adoption of RL will likely take quite a while.