Is anybody solving really cool problems anymore?
marshallp: -google goggles - image recognition is what's required for many of the things you mention including robot maid, driving car (the darpa challenge used lidar, which is expensive - purely vision based would be much cheaper).-the limiting factor to flying cars is actually air traffic control - which is still manually done, but could easily be automated (it's basically a giant constraint satisfaction/optimization problem)-kiva robots (constraint satisfaction/optimization applied to mobile robots)-heartland robotics - rodney brooks's startup, uses machine learning to control light robot arms so that heavy expensive limbs used in industrial robots aren't needed (robot arms for a few dollars in parts).