WALT DISNEY’S film version of “Mary Poppins” features a scene in which, at a click of the protagonist’s fingers, cupboards, drawers, bedside tables and trunks fly open and her young charges’ clothes and toys leap inside them. Self-tidying clothes and toys are still some way away, unfortunately. But furniture that collaborates, Poppins-like, with its owners may be just around the corner. If groups of researchers working on the idea in America and Europe have their way, you may soon be able to call a robot footstool, so that you can put your feet up at the end of a long day, make use of a robotic toolbox when doing-it-yourself of a weekend and even—yes—install a robot toybox in the nursery that will encourage your children to tidy up after themselves.
These devices and others like them will, their inventors hope, plug a gap in the market between basic robotic appliances such as Roomba, an autonomous vacuum cleaner made by iRobot, and multipurpose ’droids like Pepper, a humanoid domestic servant launched recently by Softbank. The secret of success, they believe, is not just to devise furnishings that will do what they are told, but to give them...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1Eb0u8f
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