[noduerme]

Or a generalized model to develop them in a virtual sandbox before deploying them physically, which I think is more likely.

[don_esteban]

I think the bottleneck for this is still the cost of the physical hw of the robot, and its maintenance.

You need a fairly robust one that needs little maintenance, with a multitude of good sensors and precise actuators to be even remotely useful for sufficiently wide range of tasks (so that you have economy of scales). None of that comes cheap.