I agree with the idea that we are 20 years away from a walking talking robot. One that could find the fridge, figure out which mayo is the good one, and which mayo has gone bad. The get the right ham, not the crap the kids like, and find the knives. Where are all the knives? And then put the stuff away, so nobody complains later....
I own 2 welding robots.(Miller-Panasonic Prefab Welding Cell) They are time consuming to program, and you do have to 'touch up' the program all the time. They are both 7 axis machines, with the capability of running another 13 axis each. The complexity of a setup is much much higher than a self driving car, which has go/stop/left/right as possible inputs. A self drive car is only 2 axis of movement.
In order to deal with 900 types of sandwiches in another factory, humans are used, not machines . http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sandwich-factory-worker... . They don't do it because they like paying humans. It is too complex to handle the high mix of products (900 sandwich types) for automation.
Are you saying that everything in the food industry is done by humans? Watch an episode of Unwrapped on Food Network and you'll see that everything you've just said is false. Robots make a lot more of your food than you might think.
Again, they just don't do it in a "human" way. They do it like robots do it. Driving a car is infinitely harder because you have to do it the human way.
Again, you're thinking of making an android: something that resembles a human and has fingers and hands and would spread butter with a knife. That's a far cry from "a robot that makes a sandwich". Those have existed for longer than the Internet has.
Sorry, but no. Very, very hard.
+ Find my fridge + Open it + Find the meat + Find the bread + Open the mayo + Get a knife + Spread it
etc. etc. etc.
Even if you do it 'the machines way' it's extremely difficult.
No way. Not for quite a while.
Much harder than 'driving a car'.
Without proving it directly - let me do it indirectly:
Factories would love to have robots with such intelligence and dexterity. It's definitely worth '10's of thousands of dollars' per machine to do that.
If machines could do that ... even Chinese labourers would be out of a job.
We can barely make robotic arms that 'hold stuff' of any weight reasonably without getting out of balance.
Go ahead and look at industrial grade robot-arms - you'll see these powerful steel machines - max load: 5 lbs (!).
McDonald's would be having robots prep your burgers - even ina a controlled/machine setting - and they don't do it - because it's a ways off.
There are so many issues with that one, it's a long way off.