Quote from Aubog007;1261956:
Wont be in my lifetime that they make such sophisticated robots to do mining, refining, smelting, transportation, maintenance, cleanup, building of facilities. It's a lot of work. Bring it on judgement day.
NASA is already holding contests and development forums for mining robots for space, some pretty interesting developments there already. Refining/smelting is more factory work, and there's already very advanced robots for factory work. Foxconn is already replacing tons of its chinese [S]slaves[/S]workers with them.
There already very basic cleaning robots (more of a novelty than anything) but the technology is there and waiting to be commercialized properly to fuel demand which will lead to improvements in the technology.
Transportation robots is kind of pointless, you don't need an actual robot to do it when the vehicle can do it itself. Google is already very far along in this tech and other companies are doing stuff with it too. At this point it's more a question of optimizing the tech, creating a demand for it, and getting it passed all the shitstorm of legal stuff, rather than creating the technology itself.
Robots for building facilities is the only thing on that list where the technology hasn't really gone anywhere yet, not that I've heard of.
What most of these robots are missing and why people think robotics is primitive is that they don't walk on 2 legs like movie robots. Walking on 2 legs is pointless for most of these tasks, but technology for that is well on it's way too. In 2013/2014 google bought pretty much every robotics company and many of them had bipedal robot technology.