I want the arm to wander around my house, pick up articles of loose clothing and put them into washing machine. Then pull them out and spread them on a drying hanger. How far away from that are we?
That's it, isn't it. The question is not, how far away from that are we, but when can you and I actually afford it? Because, as the other commenter snarkily replies, human maids already exist. The lifestyle of the singularity is already here for the rich. It's trickling down that kind of lifestyle to the rest of us that AI robots will enable. (with some amount of social upheaval.)
Lets say the robot that can do that comes out next year for $15 million. Could you afford one? I certainly can't. So pretend that it does, what changes for you and I? Nothing. So the robots that can do that won't be used as robot maids until the price comes down. Which; it will. Open source robotics and model-available AI will force things to be affordable sooner, rather than later, because we'd all like a robot to do that for us. Along with be in the kitchen, doing dishes, cleaning up; cleaning the bathroom, doing yardwork, making my bed.
The industrial versions will be used to do hideously dangerous things. underwater welding, chainsaw helicoptering, manual nuclear reactor rod removal. We already use machines for a lot of those difficult/impossible tasks, it's just a matter of programming the robots.
Which takes us back to today. How far away from that are we? The pieces are already here. Between https://ok-robot.github.io/ and https://mobile-aloha.github.io/ the building blocks are here. It's just a matter of time before someone puts the existing pieces together to make said robot, the only question is who will be first to make it, who will be first to open source it. Who will make it not just possible, but affordable?
I think even more difficult than making it affordable will be making it reliable. OK-Robot says it has has a 1/3 failure rate, and takes ~20x as long as a human, at which point you might as well do the task yourself. I'd want the error rate and speed improved by an order of magnitude before I'd consider it anything other than a fun novelty.
And as your error rate decreases, it gets exponentially more difficult to decrease it further. My guesstimate is that even ignoring the hardware issue, it would be at least a decade until we get AI capable of reaching human-level performance in household object manipulation (across a big enough class of household objects to be significantly useful in multiple tasks per day).
Google X was working on that with Everyday Robots (I used to work there) but they canceled the project. One of their old project leaders left and started Hello Robot, which is doing a much better job producing an actually useful thing. I think those robots are maybe $25k, but I’m not actually sure.
most of those are trained on a very flawed data, so in order to use it for anything non trivial, you will have to invest a lot in fine-tuning, maybe even to an extent to call it training
In the US or Western Europe, a human worker would cost you about $12-$15 per hour (depending on the actual city and whether they're paying their taxes).
You're looking at roughly 4 hours of work per 100 square meters (the average housing size[1]) per week to get the listed activities done, plus some general cleaning.
So let's call it $60 per week or $3,000 per year. If we estimate the average useful lifetime of such a robot at 5 years, they'd need to cost less than $15k (unadjusted for inflation) to make sense.
This does not take into account that the house owner also would be paying for a small portion of the societal cost of this additional unemployed houseworker. If we assume that there are roughly 1 maid per 500 citizens[2] and that each unemployed worker costs roughly $20,000 to the State per year[3] then our back-of-the-napkin math says the robot worker is generating a socialized cost of $400 per year per household member (2.17 members on average).
So... we need a ~$14,132 fully-automatic, solar-charging bot before your dream can break even.
It's unreasonable to assume that reduced demand for home cleaning would translate one-for-one into unemployment and welfare. The bottom of the labor market doesn't work that way at all.
You have to tradeoff between privacy, automation and cost.
The scenario you described is tough to solve because of edge cases sort of like FSD.
If you want that work done then its cheaper to hire a maid. It would be nice to have complete privacy and have a robot perform all those tasks flawlessly but the price point would make it economical to get a human to do it.
Perhaps you can get someone to drive the robot but that puts privacy at risk.
Same thing with sex robots it is cheaper to hire a sex worker so until something that can get us past the uncanny valley I don't think we will see a robot revolution quite yet. The hardware alone is prohibitively expensive and there is not enough people tinkering at the problem (because to hire humans is always safer and easier and cheaper).
You're not going to get "complete privacy" (aka fully-offline local-model-driven) robots outside of building one yourself... There'd be just too much of an economic incentive to use this as a data collection platform.
