

Personal Robots From Valley Startup 87
Tjeerd writes ""A Silicon Valley start-up is developing a hardware and software development platform for personal-assistant robots, autonomous boats and unmanned cars. The privately funded company, quietly started almost a year ago by eGroups founder and veteran Google architect Scott Hassan, plans to make its robotics software open source. That way, it hopes to draw a community of developers to build applications in these respective fields.""
Great start (Score:5, Insightful)
The vacuuming 'bots are cool, but there's so much more they'll need to do before they're really integrated, Jetson's-style.
Expert systems or learning? (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder what sort of competition would get people thinking about solving the "thinking" problem. Where robots make informed and appropriate decisions outside the parameters they were originally designed for. Not just to learn, but to take learnt knowledge and apply it in an "intelligent" manner.
Re:Great start (Score:2, Insightful)
* Empty the cat litter -> Wife
* Feed the cats -> Wife
* Let the dogs in/out -> Wife
* Feed the dogs -> Wife
* Do laundry -> Wife
* Clean gutters -> Wife
* etc
The Wife unit also does the hoovering.
COST?
Robomaid (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Business Strategy - unproven but hopeful (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:There's a reason there are no self-driving cars (Score:3, Insightful)
The corollary is that a litigious society prevents any advancement in technology that may have implications on human life. And if that situation ever comes about it is time to shoot all the lawyers.
Re:Robomaid (Score:3, Insightful)
And I don't mean to dig at Roomba with this, but any robotics company will have a fundamentally similar problem -- lack of power. AI isn't the only real problem with household robots -- the mechanical efficiency of them and the capability they have to store power are the real limiting factors. It doesn't matter to me if the robot can find my litter box or if it can empty the dishwasher if it doesn't have enough power to do that.