Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

The use cases in their videos are interesting, I suppose the world we live in is build for humans, so it makes sense to build a robot that is human shaped. So we don't need to buy new washing machines and redesign our house to get a robot maid.

The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like. If you're getting rid of the human and losing all the benefits of that, then just replace it with a kiosk (or mobile check in), which will do a far better job than a robot.

A few years ago, I was in Vegas for an event.

All factors of "it was Vegas" aside, one of the things that stood out to me was that the hotels have moved rapidly to rapid checkin/checkout systems where you punch in your confirmation code or name/dob and present a photo ID of some kind (passports can just be slapped against the reader) and it asks a few questions ("do you need late checkout", etc), directs you to the exact place your room is (and prints it, which was nice) and tells you where the bellhop station is if there's more than a little while before your room is ready and it can't dispense your cards.

All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans, but they "moved faster" because it didn't feel like queuing for a human, more... "waiting for a toilet"?

Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.

As for the washing machine bit: Why not push for more standards usage in home automation? We have Thread, which is really cool, and which is driving the home automation future that we're slowly getting. Once it's loaded, a homebot should't have to check the thing manually, it should get information about when, what, and how and be able to have "eyes in the back of its head" so to speak.

>All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans

Probably about 1% of the cost of the humans though...

>Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.

A robot would be less reliable than a kiosk, so if you're going to have some kind of machine replace the human, you might as well have a kiosk.

The ideal model (IMO) is a hybrid model, where you have lots of kiosks for the 90% of cases where there are no issues, and a few humans on standby to drop in and assist people who are having issues.

Or better yet, do away with the check in desk, and let people check in on their phone (some hotels already do this, and you tap your phone on the door to unlock)