You may not have to pay for it all yourself. Imagine your neighbors or friends get together to buy or rent the robot. The robot is privileged by your home security system to enter if it is by itself or with individuals that have equal or higher privileges. Your home computer knows your schedule and when you're away. When it's convenient or needed your home schedules a visit from the cleaning robot, possibly transported by autonomous vehicles, and it arrives and performs appropriate cleaning.

If the robot is humanoid or not is beside the point. It may be an expensive robot, but if it lasts years, and can service many households, it becomes affordable.

A 500,000 dollar robot, if it lasts a decade, and can service ten or twenty households is between 2,500 and 5,000 a year, 200-400 dollars a month plus maintenance and travel? It's not inconceivable. If it has 100 operational hours a week it could spend 5-10 hours at your house cleaning a week.

I'm not familiar enough with the price of house cleaning services to know if this a good deal or not. But if that first cost falls from 500,000 to 100,000 or 50,000 then surely this starts to be a great deal.

One robot shared among a whole block doesn't seem realistic. That just doesn't happen, not in the US. You'd never get everyone together to agree on it and all pay their fair share up front.

Much more likely would be a robot-for-hire service, like existing maid services, with the robot being driven in on a set schedule. The robot would have the digital key to your IoT lock and would let itself in.

Maybe not a whole block but I could see 2-3 average-size houses splitting costs and times effectively. Outside of an hour or two of dishes, an hour or two of laundry, and a couple hours cleaning, there will likely be a lot of idle time.

Like, my grandmother has a maid come once a week and the maid doesn't even use up all of her 2-hour appointment getting the place squared away.

Uber for Roombas

Then you're still competing with Merry Maids. Which pays minimum wage. Sure, there's a point at which the robot works fast enough for long enough with a sufficiently high MTBF that it becomes cheaper than a minimum wage worker. But it's still a very hard price point to hit.

I would more for a robot cleaning service than a human one. The rich stopped using servants in America more because of social reasons that cost ones, although that idea seems to be fading away as Silicon Valley tries to get people to pay to have everything done for them. Call it "single serving servants", for everything.

and you can't tell it simple non-standard instructions as efficiently. 'Leave the sheets in the spare bedroom, and please use our non-allergenic cleaning solution on the bottom shelf in the laundry'

I like the idea of the shared bot, but the gotcha is that my neighbors and I likely all want the cleaning to happen when we're at work, children are school, etc. Spreading the times equitably means everyone having to put up with it whirring and bashing around in the middle of the night once a week...

So the bot does days cleaning residential areas, then nights cleaning stores and offices.

Robots in industrial settings don't need anything like the capability (sensing, dexterity, etc.) that a useful household robot would need. And they need to be far more safe than an industrial robot, without the safety caging that industry relies on. The problem is at least an order of magnitude more difficult. It's harder than autonomous driving, both algorithmically and in terms of hardware.

There are already robotic arms without cages e.g. https://www.universal-robots.com/products/ur5-robot/

Yes, we currently don't have the technology, but nailing one or two use cases in a couple of years(e.g. being able to pick up and collect clothes onto a pile, maybe even emptying the dishwasher) may be enough for initial deployment.

Also since you can make the hardware quite safe, you can have faster Software Innovation than in cars

>Also since you can make the hardware quite safe, you can have faster Software Innovation than in cars

Probably not so. If these problems get solved, they will get solved by an intricate dance between hardware, sensing, and software. This is not like a car, where we mostly know what the hardware needs to look like and it's just a matter of nailing the algorithms. For humanoid robot we may need - will probably need - pervasive tactile sensing, and possibly smell, and certainly visible light sensing but maybe also infrared, or lidar, or sonar, or who knows? We're still arguing about inner position loop versus inner torque loop versus series-elastic-based compliance control schemes, for heaven's sake. And we don't know what the right kinematics for the hands will be, and on and on.

One thing I am absolutely certain of is that no currently existing humanoid robot could be placed in a home and successfully clean it, no matter what software it has.

>being able to pick up and collect clothes onto a pile

This is pretty much a textbook example of something that would be both very difficult for a robot and an almost trivial task for a human. A washer/dryer already does about 95% of the work of doing laundry. (Less, admittedly, if you iron but then that's another task. And one I assume there is machinery but just not worthwhile at home scale.)

And, of course, there's always the option of taking your laundry into somewhere to have it done for you. There have been efforts at services that pickup to do this sort of thing but most people aren't willing to pay for it.