Office Robots of the Near Future, Gearing Up 100
Reader jsrodrigues points out Businessweek's article on the predicted coming wave of office robots. These include offerings from Willow Garage, Anybots, and Smart Robots, all designed to automate certain bits of office-building meatspace gruntwork, like ferrying mail and making coffee, but more intelligently and smoothly than previous generations of such tools. Smart Robots has posted a scenario describing the benefits of office life with robots; a test run of robots from that company is set for early 2012 at "a major office building in Manhattan."
Door Into Summer (Score:5, Informative)
Needed: a real cleaning robot (Score:5, Informative)
A real win would be a floor cleaning robot with some smarts. Enough smarts to vacuum carpets, wash and dry hard floors, work around obstacles, use reaching tools to get into corners and crevices, notice when it finds something it can't clean and report it, recover small lost objects, stay out of the way of humans, recharge itself, clean itself, and replenish its supplies.