All I have to go on is the article, which as you say is hyperbolous. I think we essentially agree. The developers have no doubt worked hard and maybe have made some incremental contribution to robotics AI. But that is hard to judge from the hyperbolous article. Their website has zero information. It looks to me like just another homebrew robot. I would love love love to be proved wrong

A hyperbolous christmas to you.

I don't think there is any claim that this device is going to be doing everything tomorrow.

The headline of the article is:-

"The Gundersons get us ready for Basil, the robot of our dreams"

Quite a claim, really, but an "intelligent" table is not the robot of anyones dreams.

So you are saying they have entered the environmental data (ie room dimensions, furniture type and expected position etc). Then they know roughly what to expect and adapt from that baseline. That would simplify the task. A valid approach.

A robot with decent legs, arms, and appropriate sensors (for balance, vision, grip, etc) is all you need

I agree with you. That is all you need. But we don't have it. They have not built a "humanoid" robot, but a very crude machine. So I am not impressed. In my opinion, the mechanical engineering problem is much harder then the software problem. New materials and actuators are required, and I don't see them coming any time soon. So we will be stuck with incremental improvements to the machines we currently use.

Anybody peddling an autonomous general purpose domestic robot is a snake oil salesman. We are at least 20 yrs away from that (ie never).

The DARPA challenge has been a major step forward, but those robots only do one "simple" task. They did not have to deal with any mechanical challenges. They just added sensors and software to an already highly developed (over 100 years) mechanical system.

Domestic automation will continue as it has done for the last few decades, with the development of cost effective single task machines, dish washers, clothes washers, vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers.