...Or preorder, anyway.
It is the year 2016. According to Back to the Future 2, the future officially began last year. We've got real Virtual Reality at last. Electric cars are now a mainstream thing. We have drones, and..."hover"boards...Alright, so it's not quite as great as we thought it would be. There's certainly room for improvement. Robot butlers, for example, still aren't here. Or are they?
For $600 you'll soon be able to take home Jibo, an emotive robotic assistant. With no arms, it's not about to help you with chores, but can perform the sort of tasks you might expect that a mobile computer with cameras and other sensors should be capable of. It can identify family members by their face to deliver reminders, it can patrol for burglars, read stories to your kids, and do a facetime style video chat.
Pepper, by Aldebaran (makers of Nao) certainly looks more like a domestic robot. But those arms/hands aren't useful for much other than emotive expression and carrying simple objects from room to room. The dexterity is there but the software isn't. It's software upgradeable of course so that may change, but at just under $2,000 one might expect it to be more capable out of the box.
Aido may look like the same basic value proposition as Jibo, but it has a couple of innovative differences. The mobility system is a single ball, like the trackball of a mouse, which it balances upon. This helps it avoid getting snagged on clutter. It also has a build in projector. Aido will be in the $550-$600 range when it's released.
Buddy will run you $700, but does not offer meaningfully more than Aido or Jibo. The cute expressive animated face on its head, essentially just a swiveling tablet, may sway some potential customers. Without arms, the tasks he can assist you with include stuff like answering calls, reminding you of upcoming events you don't want to miss, reading recipes aloud step by step, home security and so on.
Furo-i is another armless mobile tablet, representative of the average level of home robot sophistication that can be had today for under $1,000. Specifically, Furo-i will cost $712 and perform much the same type of tasks as Aido, Buddy and Jibo.
The imagined usage case is something similar to the responsibilities of the eldest child in your family: Remembering what everyone is supposed to do and at what time, keeping an eye out for intruders, relaying messages from parents to specific children the next time they're seen and so forth.
$1,200 may seem steep for the Lawnbott Spyder, but realize, this actually does the job well. Mowing the lawn is a much bigger pain in the ass than any of the small tasks the robots above automate for you, and out of all the robotic lawn mowers available today, this is easily the most capable. It doesn't even require a perimeter wire to keep it within bounds, as it can detect the difference between grass and any other material.
I've not included robot vacuums or floor scrubbers for the simple reason that they are already widely known about. But hopefully you've come away with some idea of what to expect from home robots within a reasonable price range in the coming years. Which of these, if any, would be useful in your home?