Top 10 Household Robots

The robots have come out of the pages of science fictions today. They are very much real in every sense. People are now thinking of replacing their maids and headaches with robots. We have made a list of Top 10 Household Robots that will help to make the house and you feel better. Take a look at the list.









1.
My Spoon : To assist you to take your meals
This robot is specially designed for patients who has motion impairment. It helps them to take their meal by taking the food from tray to mouth. It can be set to three control states - manual (joystick control), semi-automatic or fully automatic. Remember Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times? Take my word, this robot is far better than that!

2Robot Building Cleaner

You don’t need to supervise this janitor. It will go through the hallways of the building, it may use the elevator to clean floors there and then come back to the position from where it started.





3
Paro : The Pet SealRobot
Modeled after a baby harp seal it can be adopted as a lovely pet. And as your companion, it won’t betray you, won’t divorce you, won’t die, won’t fall asleep when you want to talk, and they won’t even eat the favorite food out of your refrigerator. Its entire body is covered in tactile sensors, and its actuators provide it with smooth movement.


4
Robomower RL 500
This Robot Lawn mower can navigate the perimeter of the yard and then it crisscrosses the lawn in a triangular pattern cutting the grass silently. What’s more - it can also mulch


5
NEC R100 Prototype
Though it looks like Star War’s R2 D2, it can be used to control some applications like TV, air conditioners or lights. Adding to its other features it can send, receive, and play back video or email messages. It can also recognize voice commands. It turns and looks at you when you’re talking to it and the best part is that it giggles when you pat its head.
6
Asimo : the humanoid robot
130 cm tall, 54kg Asimo was the first walking humanoid robot. Now it can run at a speed of 6 km/hr, move in a circle and zigzag. It can be used to guide your guest to a meeting room or serve coffee to them.



7
Security Guard Robot
This spherical robot is based on robot probe that can detect and report intruders. It has a pendulum suspension to support its movement which propels itself left-right, forward-backward.





8
Mitsubishi Wakamaru Receptionist Robots
This 1 meter tall 30 kg robot can recognize faces and carry on simple conversations with its 10,000 stored words. It can also do some simple manual tasks. It is best suited for receptionist jobs.


9
Scooba Cleaning Robot
It does the cleaning and mopping function for house floors. It has two tank one containing cleaning water and another to suck up the dirty water. When cleaning, it first sweeps up the dirt or debris. Then it releases the cleaning fluid and a brush mechanism does the scrubing actions. After that the dirty water is sucked up. What’s more, it can avoid obstacles when doing these cleaning actions.

10
AIC-AI : the cooking robot
Shenzen-based Fanxing Science and Technology have developed this robot which can do steaming, baking, frying, boiling.








Conclusion
Though the robots are not yet a real replacement, the day is not far enough. With companies trying to produce them in large scales, the cost of production per robot is waiting to be slashed down. The Scooba Robot for cleaning has already been popular now for its cleaning works. So when are you taking one home?
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MTRS Robots Continue to Head to the Front

MTRS: iRobot Packbot

iRobot Corp., maker of those neat little Roomba home vacuuming robots and Scooba mop-replacement robots, recently announced a new contract delivery order to build additional bomb disposal robots for shipment to the U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under the terms, iRobot will deliver an additional 213 iRobot PackBot Man Transportable Robotic Systems (MTRS), plus spare parts to repair robots in the field. The new award of $26 million marks the third round of funding by the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), bringing the total value of the orders placed to date to more than $43 million.

Banned in Boot Camp…

The US Army is also involved in the MTRS tri-service procurement program, just as the Packbots are one of two robot types approved for use under this program. Foster-Miller, purchased by the British defense research firm QinetiQ in November 2005, also supplies its TALON IV robots to the program, while supporting previous versions in the field like the TALON III. DID covered the entire MTRS program in-depth back in September 2005, including the program structure (which includes the latest iRobot delivery) and the robots involved. A subsequent December 2005 article covered the Bombot, a much smaller and cheaper robot designed as an explicit alternative to MTRS.

Artificial Intelligence

Robotics could be said as the advanced level of "Artificial Intelligence".

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. Textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents," where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."

The field was founded on the claim that a central property of humans, intelligence—the sapience of Homo sapiens—can be so precisely described that it can be simulated by a machine. This raises philosophical issues about the nature of the mind and limits of scientific hubris, issues which have been addressed by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity. Artificial intelligence has been the subject of optimism, but has also suffered setbacks and, today, has become an essential part of the technology industry, providing the heavy lifting for many of the most difficult problems in computer science.

AI research is highly technical and specialized, deeply divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other. Subfields have grown up around particular institutions, the work of individual researchers, the solution of specific problems, longstanding differences of opinion about how AI should be done and the application of widely differing tools. The central problems of AI include such traits as reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception and the ability to move and manipulate objects. General intelligence (or "strong AI") is still a long-term goal of (some) research.

Robots are getting ready to become our surgeons, military expert says

May 20th, 2008, 10:18 am by Colin Stewart
The future of surgery will soon arrive, says military adviser Dr. Richard M. Satava, bringing with it:
• Robot surgeons.
• Operating rooms containing no human other than the patient.
• Computerized microsurgery on the innards of human cells.
• A high-frequency ultrasound beam that can heal internal bleeding without surgery.
• Surgery by miniature robots released into the abdomen.
Those developments are either under way or logical outgrowths of current technology, Satava told the bio-engineering conference “Disruptive Technologies for the 21st Century: Engineering the Life Sciences,” held Monday, May 19, at UC-Irvine.
Although he has been predicting some of those amazing developments for more than a decade, Satava says many of them are coming close to reality. His talk was full of fascinating possibilities, but he explored no topic in depth.
Satava, of the University of Washington, is an expert on robotic surgery and virtual reality who has done extensive work on advanced military medicine with support from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Related links:
• Background information on Satava’s work and related subjects.
• Call him Dr. Robot, the man who saves lives with machines
• Brain surgeon teams with rocket scientists on high-tech tools
• A full transcript of my live reports on the conference and speakers’ observations on advances in the war against diseases including cancer, heart disease and cystic fibrosis.
Da Vinci surgical robots gain ‘incisionless surgery’ technology
May 12th, 2008, 4:13 pm by Colin Stewart
The makers of Da Vinci surgical robots have teamed up with USGI Medical, a leader in surgical devices for experimental operations performed through natural orifices such as the mouth.
San Clemente-based USGI announced today that it has licensed its surgical technology to Sunnyvale-based Intuitive Surgical for use in robotically assisted medical applications.
USGI calls its technology “incisionless surgery,” because its surgical system makes no external cut in a patient’s abdomen. Instead, for example, the cut is made through the stomach wall for an “incisionless” appendectomy.
The licensing deal opens the possibility of expanding the uses for Da Vinci robots, which so far have been most popular as a tool for improving surgeons’ accuracy in minimally invasive urology operations. Finances of the deal were not disclosed.
Surgeons used USGI’s EndoSurgical Operating System, or EOS, in the first operations that removed an appendix and a gall bladder through the stomach wall. Many doctors use the EOS routinely for reducing the size of the gastric pouch in patients who regain weight after gastric bypass surgery, USGI says.

Robots to now learn from experiences

London, April 27 (IANS) Robots, like children, will soon learn best from their own experiences, according to a team of EU scientists working on a new robot platform.

The team behind the EU-funded RobotCub project, which designed the iCub robot, discovered that teaching robots to understand enough to act independently is more difficult than initially believed, ScienceDaily reported.

But the technologies developed on the iCub platform – grasping, locomotion and interaction – are relevant to further advances in the field of industrial service robotics.

And it is to make these advances that iCub’s are being sent to six European research labs where they are to be trained to learn about their surroundings – just as a child would.

The six projects will include one from Imperial College London that will explore how “mirror neurons” found in the human brain can be translated into a digital application.

Discovered in the early 1990s, these neurons trigger memories of previous experiences when humans are trying to understand the physical actions of others.

Other projects will look at iCub’s “cognitive architecture”, the dynamics needed for it to achieve full body control, the development of its manipulation skills, its internal simulation techniques – something brains do when planning actions or trying to understand the actions of others, and iCub’s ability to link objects with verbal utterances.

The iCub robots are about the size of three-year-old children, with highly dexterous hands and fully articulated heads and eyes. They have hearing and touch capabilities and are designed to be able to crawl on all fours and to sit up.

Humans develop their abilities to interact with the world around them through their experiences. Small children learn and understand the actions of others by comparing their actions to previous experience.

The developers of iCub want to develop their robots’ cognitive capabilities by mimicking that process.

Researchers from the Robotcub project designed the iCub’s hardware and software using a modular system.

The design increases the efficiency of the robot, and allows researchers to easily update individual components. It also allows large numbers of researchers to work independently on separate aspects of the robot.

iCub’s software coding, along with technical drawings, are free to anyone who wishes to download and use them.

“We really like the idea of being open as it is a way to build a community of many people working towards a common objective,” said Giorgio Metta, one of the developers of iCub.

Indo-Asian News Service