{"id":196670,"date":"2025-12-17T15:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T15:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/196670\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T15:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T15:11:08","slug":"welcome-to-home-robotics-limbo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/196670\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to home robotics limbo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n A version of this story appeared in CNN Business\u2019 Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

New York
\n \u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n Tech historians may look back on 2025 as a kind of trough in consumer robotics.\n <\/p>\n

\n Two decades ago, Roombas blew everyone\u2019s mind. The company that made them, iRobot, was so flush by 2015 it started its own venture capital arm. But after years of struggling to compete against cheaper competitors from China and a failed acquisition effort by Amazon in 2024, iRobot has been spinning out.\n <\/p>\n

\n It filed for bankruptcy protection<\/a> on Sunday, announcing plans to be acquired by a Chinese supplier. (Fans, fear not: The company said it plans to continue operating without disruption to app functionality or product support. So your Roomba should, for now, keep making its little circuitous cleaning routes, occasionally getting itself stuck under the coffee table and reliably scaring the crap out the dog.)\n <\/p>\n

\n Meanwhile, Tesla (TSLA<\/a>) shares hit a record high<\/a> Tuesday, largely driven by CEO Elon Musk\u2019s promise that the electric car company is making progress on its transition into an AI and robotics shop.\n <\/p>\n

\n Wall Street got especially fired up about Musk\u2019s tweet over the weekend saying the company is testing actual driverless Robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas, six months after launching limited services with safety drivers in the car. Investors have been equally or even more optimistic about Optimus, Tesla\u2019s humanoid machine, despite the product\u2019s repeated (literal) stumbles (more on that in a moment).\n <\/p>\n

\n So here we are: Roomba, the tech that put consumer robots on the map, now feels relatively ho-hum \u2014 one brand among many automated vacuums on the market \u2014 while the dream of an Optimus-esque bot to handle all of our domestic drudgery remains, for now, more Musk-ian fantasy than reality.\n <\/p>\n

\n Will all the money going into Tesla usher in a future where we, in 2035, look back at today and wonder how on earth we managed to clean our homes without robot helpers?\n <\/p>\n

\n While there\u2019s literally no one on the planet who\u2019d be happier to welcome her own personal Rosey from the Jetsons, I\u2019m not holding my breath for Musk\u2019s mechanical monster. Neither, for that matter, is the co-creator of the Roomba, Rodney Brooks, whom the New York Times called<\/a> the \u201cgodfather of modern robotics.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n ICYMI: Earlier this month, an Optimus demo in Miami, titled \u201cAutonomy Visualized,\u201d went viral for all the wrong reasons. In widely circulated video, an Optimus model is seen knocking over a bunch of water bottles before raising its hands to its head and tumbling backward. To many, the motion closely resembled that of a human taking off a VR headset \u2014 which is, incidentally, how Tesla has controlled<\/a> its dancing, bartending robots at previous events, at times without disclosing the tele-operation detail to the human attendees.\n <\/p>\n

\n Tesla didn\u2019t respond to CNN\u2019s request to comment.\n <\/p>\n

\n Musk in September declared on X that Optimus would eventually account for \u201c~80% of Tesla\u2019s value.\u201d When? And how? He didn\u2019t say. He also said in November that Optimus \u201cwill actually eliminate poverty.\u201d (Again, he glossed over the \u201chow\u201d of it all, perhaps distracted by the crowd of shareholders who\u2019d just approved his $ trillion pay package chanting \u201cElon, Elon!\u201d according to Business Insider.<\/a>)\n <\/p>\n

\n In fairness, since Roomba swirled into the picture, the home robotics game has been one of more losses than wins. Amazon\u2019s $1,500 Astro device \u2014 essentially a smart speaker on wheels \u2014 was a dud for the ages<\/a>. Neo, the humanoid robot from 1X, costs $20,000 for early adopters, isn\u2019t allowed to operate around kids or pets and may require a human being to remote control it while it\u2019s in your home.\n <\/p>\n

\n For Brooks, however, the whole concept of a bipedal humanoid helper is \u201cpure fantasy thinking\u201d<\/a> that investors are wasting their money on. For starters, he argues, scientists are nowhere near being able to replicate the massively complex processes underlying human touch and dexterity. Humanoid robots are also, understandably, an unavoidable falling-over-and-breaking-stuff hazard.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cNo human-like robot hands have demonstrated much in the way of dexterity, in any general sense,\u201d he argued in a September blog post<\/a>. And this week, he told the Times: \u201cI\u2019m very convinced that humanoid robots are not going to have human-level manipulation.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n That argument doesn\u2019t seem to be keeping any Tesla bulls up at night. The company\u2019s stock, after a bumpy spring and summer, is up nearly 30% this year.\n <\/p>\n

\n Once again, some investors have decided it doesn\u2019t matter whether the hype is real \u2014 just that it can be sustained.<\/a> I for one am sitting out the Optimus hype and holding onto my Roomba, which, one day, I\u2019ll pull out of a dusty box to show my grandkids how awesome technology seemed for one brief, shining moment.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A version of this story appeared in CNN Business\u2019 Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-196670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}