In much the same way that we don’t travel by flying car, we also aren’t waited on by robotic servants. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who was one of the central figures in Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, is disheartened with what he sees as the sector stalling out. Of course, the same thing was said many times about personal computing, that it hadn’t sealed the deal, until, of course, it began to, dramatically. And just because all our sci-fi dreams haven’t come to fruition that doesn’t mean that what we have achieved has been miniscule. From Sharon Gaudin at Computerworld:

“Russ Tedrake, an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, acknowledged Brooks’ points about the state of robotics today, but said big positive changes could come soon via research being pushed by major companies like Google.

‘He’s right that there are lots of things that we haven’t done yet that we had expected to do right now. The early promise was that we’d have robots everywhere by now,’ said Tedrake. ‘Look at Google’s purchase of robotics companies. That’s a massive change in the robotics landscape. The number of companies that are starting robotics and asking how they can work with robots is extremely exciting.’

Will many homes have their own robot that will babysit the kids, make dinner and clean the windows any time soon?

Probably not, according to Tedrake. However, we may have something similar.

‘Maybe we’ll have several small, special-purpose robots instead of one general-purpose robot,’ he said. ‘They might clean your house, cook dinner and mop the floor. Maybe we’ll call them appliances instead of robots.'”