Robots for Home™ explores the non-material nature of mind and decision making through practical, hands on robotics projects that do useful work around the home.

Why DON'T we have robots mowing our laws, washing and putting away our dishes, and folding our laundry for us, and what to DO about it

Since the advent of computers in the 1940's, the public imagination has been ablaze with images of intelligent, personal robots that cater to their owner's every whim…tirelessly performing chores around the home. As of 2010, a survey of the personal and home robotics markets reveals robots that are a far cry from the "C3-POs" (Star Wars) or "Rosies" (The Jetsons) that are standard fare in television and movies. In a candid talk on the future of intelligent robots, AI researcher Hod Lipson asked, "So where ARE all the intelligent robots that were supposed to make are lives so much easier?" Given the current state of the home robotics market, this is a perfectly natural question to ask. Why AREN'T our machines mowing our laws, washing and putting away our dishes, and folding our laundry for us? Here's why, and here's what to do about it….

Mind Over Entropy (or, "The Blind Watch Maker meets the Blind House Keeper")

Image you are walking along a beach and find a watch lying on the seashore. You pick up the watch and examine it. Would you seriously believe that the universe acting under natural law (i.e. the wind and waves moving the sand, rocks, etc.) over time formed a perfectly crafted clock? Would you seriously believe that mindless, purposeless physical forces acted as a sort of "blind watch maker"?

Contemplating this, you place the watch in your pocket and continue walking along the beach, where you come to a house of rotten, pale gray wood…beaten, bending, and splintered from the stress of the sea, wind and elements over time. The windows are broken, and the door is ajar and slightly off its hinges.

Would your first impression of the house be that the home is occupied…or abandoned?

Contemplating this…you continue on your journey and come to a second home. This time, the home is beautifully painted and surrounded by a manicured lawn with manicured trees and bushes. The windows are intact, shiny and clean. The door is closed and on its hinges. Though the lights in the home are turned off, would your first impression of the home be that it is abandoned, or that someone is living there?

The point? We intuitively associate order, such as the order of a clean, well maintained home, with the presence of an intelligent mind…a decision maker. Homes don't clean themselves.

Just as it is with homes, so it is with ALL of the order found in the universe. A Mind…God…created and actively maintains the universe and all that is in it…all of its order and complexity.

So…Why DON'T we have robots creating and maintaining the order in our homes? The answer is because… ultimately it is a mind, and not a machine, algorithm, or blind evolutionary process that is the underlying source of the intelligent behavior and decision making required to create and maintain such order and complexity. This is not a limitation of our current technology, but a fact about the universe we live in. This does not mean we can't have robots do our chores around the home for us…it simply means a different mindset and approach is necessary than the one that is currently being taken.

What to do about it: How to make Robots for Home™ a Reality. Presently, the best and brightest minds in the field of computer science and the inappropriately named "artificial" intelligence field are searching for algorithms that can enable a computer to "learn on its own" the tasks and steps necessary to navigate around complex terrain such as a home or yard, and "learn on its own" how to perform various cleaning and maintenance chores, etc. For reasons such as the ones given above…this will never happen. At some point along in the process…a mind external to the machine (or algorithm) is going to have to shape or bias the machine (or algorithm) in order to get the machine to behave in the desired way.

The purpose of the Robots for Home™ website is to introduce these concepts to the general public, within the context of actually building working "Robots for Home". The idea of exploring philosophical concepts about the nature of mind and decision making, through practical hands on robotics projects that can actually do useful work around the home is a satisfying one…(Does being both Practical and Philosophical make you a practical philosopher, a practicing philosopher, or both?) The first Robots for Home™ project we have begun work on, the Mowbot™, is a lawn mowing robot project.