Where are all the robots? – TechCrunch

We were promised robots everywhere -- fully autonomous robots that will drive our cars end-to-end, clean our dishes, drive our freight, make our food, pipette and do our lab work, write our legal documents, mow the lawn, balance our books and even clean our houses. And yet instead of Terminator or WALL-E or HAL 9000 or R2-D2, all we got is Facebook serving us ads we don't want to click on, Netflix recommending us another movie that we probably shouldn't stay up to watch, and iRobot's Roomba. Where are all the robots? This is the question I've been trying to investigate while building my own robotics company (a currently stealth company named Chef Robotics in the food robotics space) as well as investing in many robotics/AI companies through my venture capital fund Prototype Capital. Industrial six degrees of freedom (read as six motors serially attached to each other) robot arms were actually developed around 1973 and there are hundreds of thousands of them out there -- it's just that up to this point, almost all of these robots have been in the extremely controlled environment of factory automation doing the same thing over and over again millions of times. And we've formed many multibillion dollar companies through these factory automation robots including FANUC, KUKA, ABB and Foxconn (yes they make their own robots). Go to any automotive manufacturing plant and you'll see hundreds (or in Tesla's case, thousands). They work insanely well and can pick up massive payloads -- a full car -- and have precision sometimes up to a millimeter.