Obviously there's a really good economic incentive to work on labor replacing robots of any kind, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of startups in this space in the next 5-10 years.
I am actually a little bit surprised on why we are not seeing more kitchen robots in restaurants. Ten robots flipping burgers and assembling them and one 18 year old to hit the emergency break every now and then to remove the mustard stain on the depth camera of robot #4. (Actually robot restaurants probably wouldn't have humanoid bots, but look more like an industrial food assembly lines that served the food on plates instead of cartons that get deep frozen at the end.)
I'd expect their robots to be left in a room 24x7 with various 'toys' to pick up, manipulate, move around, climb on, etc. Then hook up the actuators and sensors to a big datacenter scale training thing and get it to learn all the dynamics and stuff with some kind of reinforcement learning.
The fact they're still debugging exact foot placement, balance and how to grip items seems so very 2010's. The AI should have figured that out from tens of thousands of hours of training data by now.
I suspect the reason they can't use these AI based methods are that their robot is too expensive to make many of... Their robot is too fragile and would break itself too quickly left to try out random things.
I think they need to work on a more robust robot, with sensors to detect when anything is 'nearly damaged' (ie. like pain sensors - perhaps in the form of an air-filled inflatable coat, where any pressure increase means the body is touching on something, which can be fed back to the AI as 'pain').
