Cleaning robot has homing tendency

Citation

(2003), "Cleaning robot has homing tendency", Industrial Robot, Vol. 30 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2003.04930bab.003

Cleaning robot has homing tendency

Cleaning robot has homing tendency

Keywords: Robots, Cleaning, Toshibav

Toshiba Corp. of Japan has begun to market a home cleaning robot that it developed with the Swedish firm of AB Electrolux. Advertised as the “Trilobite,” this robot vacuum roams on its own navigation movements, avoiding furniture and other “obstacles” using an ultrasound sensor. This robot can run for up to 60 min on just a single charge and automatically returns “home” when finished, provided the two are in “the same room.” Trilobite measures 35 cm in diameter and stands 13 cm in height. Toshiba is advertising it “as the first household cleaning robot to reach the Japanese market”.

Electrolux began to sell Trilobite in Europe last November and Toshiba modified the charger and other electrical components to meet Japanese domestic specifications. It will go on sale Japan-wide under the Electrolux-by-Toshiba brand. The machine will be sold at home appliance chains and is expected to be priced at about $1,850 each. The Tokyo firm aims at first-year sales of around 2,000 units, and hopes to double this total in 3 years time, on an annual basis.

An English language teaching robot has also made its debut, developed by the Kyoto city-based Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, known as the ATR. The Kyoto-based private Buddhist Ritsameikan and others have formed a group to develop a robot capable of teaching basic English to young children, in the pre-teenage group.

The group, which includes other educational institutions and information technology firms, will enhance an ATR-developed robot known as Muu with an increased memory capacity and improved conversational ability to “create a module that can teach English.” This “pet-like” Muu made its debut as a robot capable of speaking “kansai-ben,” the dialect locally used by the natives of the Kansai area, in central Japan, the largest of the nation’s four main “home islands”. The standard Japanese word for thanks is arigato but becomes “o-kini” in the Kansai countryside and the major cities of Osaka, Nagoya, and beyond Kyoto.