Science fiction has promised us a whole lot of technology that it’s rudely failed to deliver—jetpacks, flying cars, teleportation. The most useful one might be the robot companion, à la Rosie from The Jetsons, a machine that watches over the home.

It seemed like 2018 was going to be the year when robots made a big leap in that direction. Two machines in particular surfaced to much fanfare: Kuri, an adorable R2D2 analog that can follow you around and take pictures of your dinner parties, and Jibo, a desktop robot with a screen for a face that works a bit like Alexa, only it can dance.

But then, as quickly as the home robots came, they disappeared. In July, the maker of Kuri, Mayfield Robotics, said it was ceasing production of the robot, and a month later it announced it was ceasing its existence as a company altogether. In November, Jibo shuttered as well. In the spring, yet another company that was exploring home robots, TickTock, called it quits.

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What, then, happened to the Year of the Home Robot?

For one, it was a victim of utility—or lack thereof. Kuri and Jibo didn’t do much. Kuri was cute, sure, but it really just rolled around and engaged in a few simple interactions. Jibo could tell you the weather and set alarms, but it was stuck on a countertop, essentially making it a $900 personal assistant with nowhere near the smarts of Alexa.

The true promise of the home robot—what will separate it from a mere AI assistant—is dexterity and movement. But “that movement has to be done in support of something people want,” says Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “Just having a robot on your desktop moving in entertaining ways is not what we want.”

Figuring out what people actually want brings us to the second problem of social home robots: expectations. I can pretty much guarantee that what you expect of a robot isn’t realistic, through no fault of your own. Science fiction has warped our ideas of how much the machines can actually do. “People are imagining Rosie from The Jetsons, whereas we are really at a primitive point where the only really useful robots that don't disappoint people's expectations are things like the Roomba, which just does one thing and does it really well,” says MIT roboticist Kate Darling.

It’s not just writers and producers who are churning out these fictions. The robot companies themselves perpetuate false expectations. “A lot of the videos they put out are product videos,” Darling adds, “rather than, here's an honest video showing what this robot looks like the 50 times it fell over instead of the one time it worked out.”

This is a matter of some contention in the robotics community. It’s hard to blame a manufacturer that’s trying to sell a home robot for producing glitzy and perhaps overly optimistic videos showing the machine in action. But even if a company isn’t trying to sell a robot, they run the risk of influencing the public’s understanding of what robots are capable of at this time.

Want more? Read all of WIRED’s year-end coverage

The classic example is Boston Dynamics, which has for years wowed the interwebs with videos of its humanoid robot Atlas doing backflips and other parkour-ery. But as Boston Dynamics boss Marc Raibert revealed at the WIRED25 conference in October, it took them 20 tries to get the robot to bound up a series of boxes. “In our videos we typically show the very best behavior,” Raibert said. “It's not the average behavior or the typical behavior. And we think of it as an aspirational target for what the robots do.”