Robots – is there anything they can’t do? Actually, there’s plenty – though a team of Italian and Japanese scientists have decided they should clean whiteboards instead.
If we are to follow the future timeline of The Jetsons (and why not?), the family’s household robot, Rosie, is 45-years-old in the year 2062. That means that household robots have been kept from public knowledge since at least 2007, and with good reason – robots, even semi-intelligent robots are potentially terrifying.
If movies have taught us anything though, it’s that robots will eventually overthrow their cruel masters (us) and enslave humanity until the end of time, while harvesting our delicious organs for whichever evil ends they desire.
Hence any demonstration of robotics is a cause for concern, whether it’s Sony’s lonely Japanese businessman toy, the robotic AIBO dog, or cyborgs such as Robocop or Stephen Hawking.
Thankfully, any horrific dystopian visions of the future are, by our estimates, at least five years away, especially since the best Fujitsu can come up with is a friendly humanoid robot that cleans whiteboards. That’s right – hours of tireless whiteboard cleaning is now robot work. Look at him below, he quite literally is a whiteboard-cleaning machine.
A team of fate-tempting Italian and Japanese researchers have taught Fujitsu’s HOAP-2 robot the menial and somewhat demeaning task of cleaning a whiteboard after discovering a breakthrough in the robot which was first released in 2003.
The term the team is touting is “upper-body kinesthetic teaching”, which can apparently be applied to a variety of vertical surface tasks, such as wallpaper fitting or window cleaning. Truly, they have created the dullest robot you can ever imagine.
The research was conducted as a joint effort between the Italian Institute of Technology and Tokyo City University and is to be presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in May 2011 in Shanghai, China – an event which has ‘giant robot uprising begins’ written all over it.
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