RIDC-01 robot maid has a built-in vacuum cleaner (see video) that lets it clean as it goes. It can clean your home in a completely autonomous manner, using path-finding algorithms to find its way around and completely clean your home. It also has dusting mitts on its hands for those hard-to-reach spaces.
(RIDC-01 responds to verbal commands)
Voice recognition and speech synthesis are built-in and it can understand a wide variety of commands - as long as you speak Japanese. Want the news? RIDC-01 can pull it off your wireless network. Entertainment? It has a DVD player in its head.
Since I know you are thinking of Rosie the robot maid from the Jetson's, I'll include a photo for the boomers.
(Rosie the robot maid from the Jetson's [circa 1960])
For the science fiction fans, I'll include the earliest reference I know about, from Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer:
What Hired Girl would do (the first model, not the semi-intelligent robot I developed it into) was to clean floors . . . any floor, all day long and without supervision. And there never was a floor that didn't need cleaning. It swept, or mopped, or vacuum-cleaned, or polished, consulting tapes in its idiot memory to decide which.
(Read more about Heinlein's hired girl robot maid)
RIDC-01 is brought to you by our friends at TMSUK, who also created such totally excellent products as the T52 Enryu Support Dragon Hyper Rescue Robot, a teleoperated robot that can actually tear the doors off a car. Now, that's a bot with some cleaning power.
RIDC-01 has been priced at about $85,000 but is not yet commercially available.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 11/28/2006)
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