| Fwiw, I work in home robotics, but have no experience in self driving. My halfway-naive belief is that self-driving is easier than getting useful home robots —in fact I feel it’s not even a close comparison. Some reasons: - The home is a very unstructured environment, whereas roads have at least _some structure_, and perhaps ~70% of the most useful roads even have clear lane markings and other signs. - People already know that roads are dangerous, and there’s an expectation that babies won’t suddenly crawl in front of cars. This doesn’t exist in the home - People are more comfortable being recorded on roads and highways than in their own homes, so you can get training data more easily for self driving. - to do something useful in the home, imo you need to solve navigation _and_ complicated manipulation problems. For self driving, you only need to solve the navigation problem. - (this is speculation on my part) Customers will happily pay 10k-20k extra for a self-driving car, and there are industries in which even more cost makes sense. Customers are less likely to pay that for a robot that does your chores Would be very interested to hear the perspective of someone that works on self-driving |
Right. It can be challenging to figure out how fast, what lane, should I brake, etc. in many cities. But there are really only a few things the car can control. And its objectives are pretty simple: Obey the law, don't hit anything (and avoid being hit), and get to point B.
By contrast, think of all the different types of manipulation you need to clean up around the house and the 100 judgements you make you decide what needs to be cleaned--which will vary by person.