How Apple’s Electric Car Loss Could Fuel Gains in Home Robotics

For every tech success story, there are countless projects that slam headlong into the brick wall of reality. Apple’s electric vehicle ambitions are one of the most recent — and, frankly, best — examples of a project failing in spite of seeming to have everything going for it.

The jury is still out on the ultimate fate of the Vision Pro, but at the very least, Apple’s mixed reality headset demonstrates that the company isn’t afraid to keep trying where pretty much everyone else has failed. With the Apple Car firmly in the rearview, the company is reportedly exploring yet another notoriously difficult path: home robots.

The category is both unique and uniquely difficult for a number of reasons. One thing that sets it apart from other categories is the fact that there’s been precisely one success story: the robot vacuum. It’s been 22 years since the first Roomba was introduced, and for the past two decades, an entire industry (including iRobot itself) has been chasing that success.

iRobot’s inability to strike gold a second time is not for lack of trying. In the nearly quarter-century since it introduced Roomba, it’s given us gutter clearers, pool cleaners, lawn mowers and even a Roomba specifically designed to remove screws and other hardware detritus off garage floors. In spite of those efforts, however, the company has fared best when it focused its resources back into its robot vacuum.

Image Credits: iRobot

The success of the robot vacuum lies in its ability to repeatedly perform a singular, high-demand task to optimum capacity. Even today, vacuum cleaners remain the primary arena of confrontation in the home robot wars. Consider Matic, a heavily financed startup from the Bay Area. The ex-Google/Nest engineers who established Matic posit that the next groundbreaking development in household technology will be based on robot vacuums. Part of their argument is that iRobot has trapped itself within its puck-like design.

The initial Roombas were not engineered with current sensing and mapping functionalities in mind. Matic theorizes that simply increasing the height of the robot can significantly enhance its perspective. This concept influenced the most innovative feature of Amazon’s Astro home robot: the periscope camera.

Image Credits: Amazon

It’s an undeniable truth that the effectiveness of household robots is significantly stunted by their shape and size. The popular ‘hockey puck’ design used in most robot vacuum cleaners limits them to carrying out only basic functionality for which they’ve been designed. In order to execute more tasks that may be needed around the house, a more complex hardware configuration is necessary. Mobile manipulators are the perfect example of this, suggesting that if you want a hand with house chores, starting with building a ‘hand’ isn’t such a bad idea.

However, as is the norm with many things, the conception of mobile manipulators is far from easy. Industrial robotics hasn’t yet mastered this concept. Large, immobile robotic arms are frequent sights on manufacturing assembly lines, and wheeled Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) like Locus and Kiva are ubiquitous in warehouses, but a middle ground, a combination of the two, remains elusive. This is a primary reason why human intervention is still very much needed in these spaces. Although this issue is likely to be resolved soon, it’s plausible that these costlier industrial machines would adopt it before cheaper home robots—after all, businesses typically have more funds to spare than individuals.

This absence of a perfect middle ground is also why many advocate for humanoid robots in the work environment – human beings, as it stands, provide the optimum form of mobile manipulation. But a detailed discourse on this topic is a discussion for another time.

Image Credits: Hello Robotics

Household robots are not that distant from having mobile manipulation capabilities. One impressive example today is Stretch by Hello Robot. The robot resembles a Roomba with a pole in the middle, housing both an imaging system and a vertically moving arm for grabbing items of different heights, such as dishes or laundry. However, the execution of certain tasks would be more convenient with two arms, providing an insight into why many robotics companies have been reverse-engineering humanoids.

Currently, Stretch’s steep price of $24,950 makes it unaffordable for many. This explains why it is primarily being marketed as a development platform. Matic, interestingly, views its own robot similarly, using vacuuming chore as a stepping stone for introducing more household tasks.

One problem with Stretch is its teleoperation. Although teleoperation can be beneficial in various instances, it is unlikely that people will be eager to bring home robots controlled by humans from a distant location.

Navigation within the household presents another considerable challenge. Homes are comparatively unstructured than warehouses or factories, they widely vary, lighting conditions are inconsistent and humans are continually relocating Items and leaving things on the floor.

Matic’s vacuum uses an array of cameras to map spaces — and understand where it is in them. Image Credits: Matic

The world of self-driving has faced its own obstacles on this front. But the key difference between an autonomous robot on the highway and another in the home is that the worst the latter is probably going to do is knock something off a shelf. That’s bad, but very rarely does it result in death. With self-driving cars, on the other hand, any accident represents a significant step back for the industry. The technology is — perhaps understandably — being held to a higher standard than its human counterpart.

While adoption of self-driving technologies is well behind the curve that many anticipated, largely for the above safety reason, many of the technologies developed for the category have helped quietly kickstart their own robotics revolution, as autonomous vehicles take over farms and sidewalks.

This is likely a big part of the reason it might view home robots as “the next big thing” (to quote Bloomberg quoting its sources). Apple has no doubt pumped a tremendous amount of resources into driving technologies. If those could be repurposed for a different project, maybe it won’t all be for naught.

Reports suggest that while Apple has not made final decisions on the smart screen or mobile robot rumored to be under development in their experimental labs, they have assigned Apple Home executives Matt Costello and Brian Lynch to the hardware aspect of the projects. John Giannandrea, SVP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is also reported to have involvement in the AI segment.

The company’s focus on home automation means it’s possible that they’re working on something akin to Amazon’s Astro. This project, however, has served as a warning so far due to its high cost and limited functionality. It predominantly acts as a mobile Alexa portal, but home assistants have been declining in popularity recently.

Apple does possess some experience in robotics, but it does not come close to the industrial capabilities of Amazon. The tech giant has contributed to the manufacturing of robotic arms like Daisy, a device that efficiently recovers valuable metals from old iPhones. However, developing a home robot would be a significant advancement for Apple.

Perhaps the company could take a more Vision Pro-like approach to the category, which has a heavy focus on developer contributions. Doing so, however, would require an extremely versatile hardware platform, which would almost certainly be cost-prohibitive for most consumers, making the Vision Pro’s $3,500 price tag look like small potatoes.

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