I was reading a short article/blurb from the Detroit Free Press that was talking about the robot developments being pursued between Toyota and Honda. While the article itself wasn't too informative there was a short paragraph that lent itself to some technology I've been testing for the past month.
Besides, some robots are practical: Hitachi sells a cleaning robot that maneuvers around furniture and sucks up dirt.
I don't know about the Hitachi cleaning robot, but I've been fortunate to be testing out a robot known as Roomba from the company iRobot. The picture you see is a photo I took of the Roomba cleaning my living room. I must say that I was skeptical at first but from the first time I set it away cleaning in my home I was really impressed by what this little robot can do. I simply set it down in a room, select the room size by pressing either S, M, L (small, medium, large - this sets how long it will run) and the Roomba begins moving in a circle that it slowly moves out from in spiral pattern. As it continues to expand the radius of the area it is cleaning, should it encounter an obstacle, like my chair in the photo, it then begins to trace around the object, cleaning as it goes.
How effective is it?
Well after my two year old has eaten a bowl of cereal while watching Saturday cartoons the living room floor is usually covered in cereal. So once I got the Roomba and had tried it out for a while, I took it one Saturday morning and got it going just as I loaded the kids up in the car for ballet. I had people coming over that afternoon so I crossed my fingers and hoped the Roomba would do a decent job. Much to my surprise, when I came home, the Roomba was sitting in a corner of the room - it had turned itself off. When I looked around the room there wasn't a single Cheerio to be found. Not one! I was impressed and so was my wife. I look at the Roomba as an excellent application for what robot technology can do for us. I will be using the Roomba to illustrate to the kids in the Youth Technology Camp how robot technology can and is being developed to assist us with everyday tasks (not to mention that I plan on setting the Roomba loose each evening to tidy up the YTC lab space!).
I had once read that the Japanese have a philosophy that robots should be developed as helpers and companions as opposed to the western mentality that robots be used for factors and military applications. I think that one day in the not too distant future, robots like the Roomba will be common place in our homes and communities if we adopt a mentality similar to the Japanese.
And so to close this little thought off, I'll take one more quote from the Detroit Free Press article that got me started.
Today's thought: Machines that act like humans are interesting. Now if only we could get humans to act like humans.
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