That's an idea. A mobile home robot that does not much more than pick up dirty clothes and dirty dishes and clean'em and file'em.

Yes. And as it is a common issue, we’ve seen it play out again and again: specialized wins for an incredibly long time, until the technology and production power leaps forward, and the generic solution becomes enough of a commodity to warrant using it in sub-par use cases.

I see the Raspberry Pi as the poster child of this: using a generic computing device to activate your garage door only makes sense because it’s so cheap to do so (at least while supply lasted)

I’d imagine humanoid robots will follow the same path: decades from now, as the cost to build one has ridiculously plummeted and we’ve already moved on to way more efficient solutions in specialized applications, we’ll have home humanoids tasked to do dumb things, because it will just be that cheap anyway.

This sums it up for me. If I could replace my dishwasher, washing machine, dryer with something that can do those things at an equivalent price/reliability then sure.

But a general robot requires far greater capability than any individual device and hence that is a hard ask.

But maybe you could lessen the general requirements by leveraging the specific machines.

IE if you can get it to use the washing machine, use the dryer, fold clothes and put them away (even if the wardrobe has to be a particular style/shape/format) - then "whole problem of washing clothes" would be solved.

And that would be popular. I'd renovate large chunks of a house if I never have to "do laundry" again.