The Digoro, the new robot that learns its house-keeping skills from you

Robot Recycler

The robot copies human movements. You can train it to do they recycling

Good news: a team of Japanese researchers has developed a robot housekeeper.
Bad news: It learns how to clean and keep house by imitating human movements. It could pick up all your bad habits, as well as any good ones you may aspire to.

Digoro the new Japanese domestic robot is a sort of mini me for housekeepers. It works by copying you. You demonstrate to the robot your normal domestic actions, such as wiping down the side board or putting up/down the toilet seat, and the android can learn to ape this movement in just ten tries. That’s 100 per cent quicker than most women learn to leave the toilet seat up.
The robot can also customise its movements based on the layout of a room or the location of furniture. So if some busy body has come into your bedroom, and picked all your clothes off the floor, the clever Android is not thrown off the trail, and can adapt to this unusual situation.
We can thank this breakthrough on the boffins at the Honda Research Institute in Japan. This subsidiary of Honda Motor has worked in tandem with the University of Electro-Communications the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology and Tamagawa University to bring an end to domestic injustices.
They hope the technology can be available to housekeepers within three years.
Digoro, which stands about 150cm tall and weighs around 120kg, has two arms and moves on electrically powered wheels.
Though many existing robots can make preprogrammed movements, Digoro is the first that can learn to do housework while making adjustments on its own. A camera in its head means it can observe its surroundings and human movements, while a microphone picks up human commands with its voice-recognition software.
The robot needs a period of adjustment. First its boss must move it around a room, allowing it to recognize the location of furniture and other objects. Then, its human boss demonstrates a movement and issues orders for Digoro to do the same, the robot is programmed to act, according to the command.
In one experiment, a researcher showed a robot the action of lifting a plastic bottle and putting it away several times. Plucky little Digoro was then ordered to move a plastic bottle atop the table to a trash can. And he did it.
‘It’s a small step for a robot, but a giant step for a man,’ said one female scientist.