Japanese Pledge Robots For the Old On the Way
Breaking news via the awesome Pink Tentacle:
Scientists at Tokyo U and a number of corporations have made it clear that robots are our future, or more specifically, they’re the future of us when we’re old.
Over the next fifteen years, the robots look to make some pretty significant advances:
The project timeline includes developing robots capable of straightening up rooms by 2008, robots capable of making beds by 2013, and robots capable of lifting/carrying the elderly by 2016. Other goals include developing robots that can arrange products on supermarket shelves, fold laundry and perform heavy-duty cleaning. Enhancing robot autonomy appears to factor highly into the goals of the project, which hopes to see the development of autonomous robots able to perform product assembly work with little supervision.
I, for one, welcome our cleaning robot overlords.
Of course until that point we’ll just have to make do with Japanese Robotic Toonces:
