Yes I assume there are cameras, and that it isn't copying exact moves but actually learning. I'm not suggesting it would figure out how to iron a shirt quickly, it would take thousands upon thousands of hours of watching/copying as someone is ironing. But hey we were worried about robots taking jobs...and there's a job! (and they are also producing ironed shirts!)
Cameras aren't particularly expensive, the ones made for cell phones can do fine and they are a couple bucks. The software is hard but machine learning is improving by leaps and bounds. And software may be expensive to develop, but it isn't expensive to make another copy of.
The problem isn't the hardware here, the problem is the software. Robots just aren't smart enough to perceive the world around them yet. People are working on it, but it's still very much in the research phase at universities. You should check out HERB at Carnegie Mellon (1), which is working on things just like this. A fun anecdote - all the students spent forever trying to get the robot to open a microwave (and keep in mind this is a highly controlled environment and they knew exactly where it was). Eventually they gave up and modified the microwave.
True. I bet if the hardware was cheap enough, the software would advance a lot quicker.
I mean, imagine the only really useful thing one of these things can do is make a copy of itself. And it might takes it a month running non-stop to do it, but the parts are cheap so it only costs a few hundred bucks for a new one. Would you want one of these things in your basement working away? I sure would. And I'd be pretty interested in tweaking its software and training data and whatnot to make it faster and better.
Sure it'll be a good while before it is folding laundry or picking weeds in the garden or whatever, but I think the pace of improvement would pick up quick once these things are available in mass.
Else you enter the World of cameras and image processing. A expensive world still.