The most common designs of six-axis robot arm don't have the 'rotate forearm sideways' joint needed to arm wrestle.

> - Handwriting notes for small jewelry brand?

Possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen

> - Drink mixer?

Possible: https://www.makrshakr.com/ (arguably more of a showy entertainment item than anything else)

> - Handing towel when in the bathroom, then getting a new one?

Manipulating flexible materials is difficult. As is navigating through a house with locked bathroom doors and suchlike.

> - Setting up my morning espresso?

Depends if you're willing to broaden your definition of 'robot' to include bean-to-cup machines.

Like arm wrestling a brick wall; if you can push it over then you win, if you can't push it over then you lose - either way there's not much fun in it. And if it can beat the toddler it risks injuring them because neither of them really understand what's happening and what the risks are. The arm can't stop if the toddler says 'ow'.

> "Handwriting notes for small jewelry brand?"

Can be done already with a commercial 2D plotter: https://www.axidraw.com/ . It costs twice as much as this arm, but you don't have to build it and it already has "software for realistic handwriting" and there's a company to get support from.

> "Handing towel when in the bathroom, then getting a new one?"

Is the arm big enough to be useful for that? It appears to be shorter than a typical human arm so it would be cheaper, simpler and quicker to put the pile of clean towels a foot closer to the shower where the robt arm is sitting, and not have the robot arm at all. Plus you wouldn't have to deal with electricity in the bathroom or dripping water on the robotics as you reached for the towel it was handing you. (Are you thinking of a robot arm with cameras for feedback of where it's positioned? Cameras in a bathroom won't be popular with everyone no matter how much you promise they are innocent).

> "Setting up my morning espresso? (grinding the beans and turning on the coffee machine)"

Simpler and cheaper done with a timer mains plug which you can get for under $10. Put the beans in and load up the coffee machine the night before (work you'd have to do anyway) and have the timer start them in the morning. If you expect the robot arm to unseal a bag of coffee beans, measure some out, deposit them in the grinder, close the grinder, and close and seal the bag after, you'll wake up to spilled beans and unsealed bag a lot of days before you get that working reliably. Instead of $250 plus weeks of effort to speed up this 2 minute task(!) you can get a Keurig / Nespresso pod coffee maker for less than $100.

> "Drink mixer?"

How much spilled wasted alcohol, plus time of disassembling and cleaning your robot arm and the surface it sits on, and the floor, or finding the bottles, unscrewing the tops, handing them to the arm, waiting for the arm to slowly pour them which you could have done quicker, then putting the tops back on and putting the bottles away yourself, then putting the drink stirrer into the arm, then waiting for it to mix the drinks which you could have done yourself quicker, before you decide this was not a good use of time or money? (How often do you drink mixed drinks anyway?)

The robot isn't going to learn to do the task better next time like a human could so if you have to get involved in the task at all, you may as well do it yourself. And if it's a 15 second task like "reaching for a towel" what are you doing with your life trying to automate that? Roomba saves a lot of time, a lot of annoyance, it could be worth it even if it does an inferior job - because you can leave it running over and over and over. Same with a robot lawnmower, if you just glance around to make sure there's no pets or children in the way then let it go, it can save you a good chunk of time and if it goes wrong you just get a patchy lawn or dusty floor and it can retry tomorrow. But handing you a towel or mixing you a drink saves you almost no time, but if it goes wrong you get a broken bottle of sticky drink all over or a pile of towels on the floor, which has undone months of 'time saved' in one go.

AND very likely to be completely outdated within a few generations (5 years?) of robotics + AI progress.

I would also not discount how easy it is to sell people on additional cameras in their homes (including the bathroom) for the sake of convenience.

Do you genuinely think they will improve to the point of having finger style grippers, dexterity and adaptability to grind coffee, mix drinks and pick towels, and be on sale to the public, safe for use in the home, for $250 (or $2500) by Jan 1st 2030? I would be very surprised.

(Can you get a robot arm today, for any price, to help a quadraplegic open their mail, bring a drink with a straw in it to their mouth, lift them into a sitting position, hold a book in front of them and turn the pages, or ... do anything helpful? I'm not aware of any, but haven't been looking specifically).

Yes you could probably build a robot today which hands you a towel from a pile, reliably and swiftly, or selects the bottles of alcohol and opens them and pours and mixes a drink - in a carefully controlled and lit environment where none of the lids or corks are stuck and the glasses are all a similar shape and size and nobody is allowed to be near it - I don't say it's impossible with today's tech, but it would cost a lot more than $250. A hundred or a hundred thousand times more, while being far far more limited than a human.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/boston-dynamics-stre...

Hardware generations are typically closer to a decade than a year. Robotics is moving fast these days, but not that fast.