Robot vacuum is allowed to crash into things and is still quite useful. You add bumpers, maybe some sort of proximity sensors to make the crash less damaging. It is safe by construction - cant harm humans because it is too small.

Things have improved a bit? Now robot shelves becomes a possibility. Map everything, use more sensors, designate humans to a particular area only. Still quite useful. It is safe by design of areas, where humans rarely walk among robots.

Improved further? Now we can do food delivery service robot. Slow down a bit, use much more sensors, think extra hard how to make it safer. Add a flag on a flagpole. Rounded body. Collisions are probably going to happen. Make the robot lighter than humans so that robot gets more damage than the human in a collision. Humans are vulnerable to falling over - make the robot hight just right to grab onto to regain balance, somewhere near waist hight.

Something like that... Now I wish this would be an actual progress requirement for a robo taxy company to do before they start releasing robo taxies onto our streets. But at least we do it as mankind, algorithm improvements, safety solutuon still benefit the whole chain. And benefit to humanity grows despite it being not quite good enough for one particular task.

Im curious to see the whole list of languages you tried, and result with each. I suspect it was related to finding suitable library for each problem (usb, graphics) more so than the language itsel. But maybe ecosystem is what we need from a language.