Everyday Robot Assistance Faces Safety and Real-Time Responsiveness Limits

Robots could be useful for cooking and other everyday tasks, but giving one a knife is described as probably a very bad idea. The specific household tasks a robot could reliably perform remain unclear.

Some interactive tasks cannot tolerate a full minute of waiting. A real-time strategy game illustrates the constraint: without a sufficient actions-per-minute rate, a player can lose even on easy mode. The required response speed for different tasks is not established.