How much would you pay for a Laundry Robot?

In the 1950's when home appliances were starting to become available to people everywhere there was a great amount of writing done about how the live of the house wive would become one of leisure and relaxation because the tasks that once consume her time would now be executed by machines. In reality since in truth it is human nature that drives how busy we are and not the gadgets in our houses we will always find an equilibrium of stress and busyness. Once again just like in the 1950's we are on the precipice of another, possibly more dramatic revolution in home automation.

Currently there is a convergence of technologies that will create the same leap in home automation. In some ways it has already started look at the Roombia or the automatic lawn mowers, both of which have automated tasks that would normally have been highly time consuming. The two driving forces behind bringing home automation to the consumer is the combination of improving computation and the ability to manufacture cheap robotics. What good is a computer that can understand housework without means to do so? Its just the same as a robot built do handle such tasks without the artificial intelligence necessary to drive it. Today both technologies are ready and only still need to be put together.

The work being done at MIT to address the computational challenges of doing the laundry:  http://www2.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?TRID=1082

the first robot that could be brought into peoples homes to do a task like laundry:

The beautiful part of a robot that could do your laundry is that after you have built a robot which is physically capable of doing your laundry you have almost by definition also built a robot which can wash your dishes. All that would stand in your way would be software to drive the process. Much like how today a smart phone can have tremendous new additional capacity added to it with the simple addition of applications so could a household robot also be improved to handle more tasks.

There obviously no end to this line of thinking, but the focus of this post is just how close we are today to having technology which will change forever the way that we live. The conversation should not come to the same false conclusions about leisure as fifty years previous but we should be talking about what will be important to us when we need spend zero time handling any process that a robotic assistant can easily assume.