There's nothing impossible today. I believe in the next succeeding research by some brilliant mind interested in modern technology, the limitations below cited will be thresh upon and eventually these robots will now become effective mechanical helper or even a lover, with the skin like that of a human being? maybe..

 

1. New Japanese house-sitter robot.

 

Worried about leaving your house empty while you go on vacation?

Japan has the answer: A house-sitter robot armed with a digital camera, infrared sensors and a videophone.

Stores across Japan have started taking orders for the ROBORIOR -- a watermelon-sized eyeball on wheels that glows purple, blue and orange -- continuing the country's love affair with gadgets.

 

ROBORIOR can function as interior decor, but also as a virtual guard dog that can sense break-ins using infrared sensors, notify homeowners by calling their cellular phones, and send the owner's cell phone videos from its digital camera.

Roborior can actually be put to practical use in the home. Such technology doesn't come cheaply. It's worth for 280,000 yen.

 

A four-legged security robot called BARNYU, which is about the size of a large dog sells for 2 million yen.

http://mdn.mainichimsn.co.jp/national/news/20050819p2a00m0na026000c.html

 

 

Another humanoid, WAKAMARU one meter-tall, 30 kilogram robots at about 1.58 million yen, robot can recognize 10,000 words and work as house sitter. It can recognize the faces of up to 10 people and talk to them. When linked to mobile phones, it can also work as a monitor to check situations at home, such as a burglary or someone falling ill. It would be the first time a robot with communication ability for home use. An opening era in which human beings and robots can coexist.

 

The buyer-owner's schedule can be programmed in advance and Wakamaru can give a wake-up call and remind them of the day's events.
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20050829p2a00m0na026000c.html

 

2. 'ROBO-DOC' to treat seriously ill.

 

An intelligent computer system, used to treat patients after major surgery, which can imitate doctors' decisions about treatment for intensive care patients is being developed by scientists.

It will monitor patients' vital signs and then evaluate and administer drugs - a job now done by specialist medics. Decisions will be made in seconds - freeing up valuable time for doctors.

 

The system is being designed by a team of engineers at the University of Sheffield with a £400,000 grant from science funding agency EPSRC. Team leader Professor Mahdi Mahfouf said the system's ability to learn, adapt and make informed decisions was unique.

 

Intelligent decisions

"This new system not only monitors and treats critical patients, but it can also learn from the experiences of medical staff, who can override the machine at any time," he said. If overridden, the system assimilates the doctor's input and uses the new information to make decisions about similar cases in the future. It models all the possible interactions between different drugs and patients' bodies and then makes intelligent decisions about the best way to treat patients during heart bypass operations and post-operatively in the ITU.

 

"This system is not intended to replace the work that doctors do in intensive care units," Mr Mahfouf stressed. "However it will provide them with invaluable assistance by evaluating the complex interactions of different drugs which are needed to treat patients and protect them against the danger of septic shock."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/south_yorkshire/4738365.stm

 

3. Robot lends 'a seeing eye' for blind shoppers.

 

Robotic Guide "dog" created by a Utah State University professor and his graduate students looks like a cross between a carpet cleaner and the plumbing fixtures in your basement. But the thinking behind the Robotic Guide is to create a device that can guide the blind through grocery-store aisles, the mall or maybe even an airport without assistance.

 

Lynn Krumm, 45, would welcome the help. Krumm has Usher syndrome type 2, a genetic disorder that involves hearing loss and can cause vision deterioration severe enough to lead to blindness. When Krumm shops in her local grocery store in Logan, Utah, she has to wait about 20 minutes for a customer-service representative to help her find items.

So Krumm, like many of the nation's 1.3 million legally blind people, has built her schedule around the availability of sighted guides. Store obstacles — product reshuffling, floor layout and sale items — make it difficult to navigate an environment that others take for granted.

"For someone losing their sight, it's hard to swallow your pride and say 'I need help with this,' " Krumm says. "This is a step towards relieving some of that anxiety and alleviating some of that dependency,"

So she was thrilled when researchers at Utah State asked her to participate in the Robotic Guide research project. "It makes you feel more like a human, a valued member of society," Krumm says.

 

Two years ago, Vladimir Kulyukin, an assistant computer science professor at Utah State, was talking with Sachin Pavithran, a friend and blind colleague, about the obstacles the blind and visually impaired routinely face.

The two decided to build a device that could help the visually impaired navigate stores.

 

The prototype, called RG, consists of a commercially available motorized base, built by MobileRobots.com, in Amherst, N.H. It has rechargeable batteries and a microcontroller that lets the unit take directions from the attached laptop computer, which has a speech-synthesis engine. The user works with a Braille store directory and a numeric keypad to tell the device what to look for.

"When the robot reaches a destination — say, the Cheerios cereal shelf in the cereal aisle — the speech-synthesis engine generates an appropriate message telling the user that the Cheerios cereal boxes are on the shelf to his/her right." Kulyukin says.

The robot also has a shopping basket mounted on top and a handle in the back that the user holds during navigation.

Still, there are limitations.

For instance, those who are not familiar with Braille will not be able to use the shopping assistant. "We are working on a speech interface that will allow the user to access the product directory through synthesized speech," Kulyukin says. After a testing phase conducted at Lee's Marketplace, a grocery store in Logan, Kulyukin negotiated with the local Wal-Mart and other grocery stores to conduct more extensive trials.

 

Other obstacles discovered while testing included the robot's inability to access individual items and navigation handling.

"Right now, the robot will guide you to the Colgate toothpaste shelf, but the user will have to grope for an individual toothpaste box," Kulyukin says. "Obviously, there is a chance that a wrong box can be picked."

The team is attempting to address the problem by integrating a small bar-code reader, which is already used by most grocery stores.

"What we anticipate is that once the robotic shopping assistant gets the user to a shelf with a bunch of individual items, the user will then use a miniature bar-code reader, essentially a pencil, to read the bar code on the shelf until the bar code of the right item is found," he says.

But at least one organization wants to take a wait-and-see approach before getting too excited.

 

Paul Schroeder, vice president of programs and policies for the American Foundation for the Blind, calls the research admirable but says the promise of technology doesn't always pan out in the real world.

"For this device to be helpful, they must conquer problems that would arise in an imperfect environment," Schroeder says.

The $5,000 device is not ready to market or mass-produce, Kulyukin says. "But we would like to eventually see the Robotic Guide in other environments, like airports."

The researchers built RG using existing technology. The work is funded by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and two grants from Utah State.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2005-07-11-robot-guide_x.htm?csp=N009