While robots once seemed to be a strange and unusual phenomenon more popular and common in Japan, robots are rapidly gaining popularity in the United States and Europe. Consider the Zoomba Robot Vacuum Cleaner—probably designed with the newbie house-husband in mind. Or the more advanced Philip K. Dick robot or the quite intelligent Watson robot who appeared on Jeopardy.

However, as advanced and as commonplace as robots are becoming, robots have (yet) to master “basic capabilities of motion and perception” that we (as humans) mastered at some point in adolescence. Robots also fail at many basic household tasks including washing the dishes and doing laundry; the failures occur when different variables are added into the equation to increase the level of difficulty. That said, some of the movement failures of robots have been improved by researchers using Microsoft’s Kinect; the Kinect allows users to control their video game characters through body movements. The Kinect is being seen as a relatively inexpensive way to broaden the horizons of robotic movement.

According to the NYT, the government is now investing a bit into robots and has a few projects going. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding three robot projects, all of which are intended to create less expensive robotic arms. 

There are several other robot projects going on; one interesting competition allows inventors to compete in the Solutions in Perception Challenge. As described by the NYT, the competition has this specific objective in mind:

“A prize of $10,000 is offered for the first team to design a robot that is able to recognize 100 items commonly found on the shelves of supermarkets and drugstores. Part of the prize will be given to the first team whose robot can recognize 80 percent of the items.”

None of the robots were able to recognize a minimum of eighty percent of the items on the shelves. (Take that robots; I may not be able to beat you on Jeopardy, but I could probably kick your ass at the grocery store in any identification test.) Berkeley did have a team of laundry-folding robot experts, but again, the robots were painfully slow and a video of the robots had to be sped up by fifty times to show what the robots could in fact, do.  However, what the robots lose in their lack of speed, they make up for in accuracy; anyone considering paying a robot to do their laundry should possibly consider paying the robot by the piece instead of by the hour. The robots are that slow.

It will be interesting to see what the future of robotics will be and nice to know that there are many things that we as people still do better than our robotic competitors.