With Home Carpeting Conquered, Robots Eye the Office [Robots]

The Roomba has conquered the home. No more vacuuming! Now robots must tackle mail delivery and low-making tasks within the office. Enter the coldly-named humanoid bot HRP-4. It doesn’t visit cyberspace. It doesn’t gossip. It simply serves.

Starting January 28, the HRP-4 will likely begin to serve man by doing just that: Delivering mail, pouring coffee and even recognizing employee faces. Buy in cost? ” Just” $350,000!

Initial customers will be research institutions and universities, both of so as to probably be ready to write off HRP-8′s incredible cost as some reasonably science experiment.

HRP-4′s assault on the workforce won’t stop at coffee and mail, however, as Noriyuki Kanehira, the robotic systems manager at the bot’s manufacturer, Kawada, says secretarial tasks are next on the ol’ robot to do list.

Other office bots on the horizon include the PR2 (beer fetcher, can’t harm humans) and ANYBOTS QB (teleconferencing). Both bots are also expensive! Who knew the robots’ greatest weakness could be their price? [ Bloomberg BusinessWeek , Image: BusinessWeek]

Source

This post is tagged: greatest weakness, initial customers, mail delivery, research institutions, robotic systems, science experiment, secretarial tasks