A robot that'll clean up mess back home while you’re at work

Work work work! You have been busy lately and the state of your room is just going down the drain. Every day you come back the chaos is getting worse and things are getting more cluttered. How good it would be if someone managed your home while you were away. A team of researchers in Cornell is working on such a robot that would take charge of keeping things in place at your messy home. This includes tasks such as keeping things in your refrigerator, identifying objects to be disposed and moving them to a dustbin, or organizing clothes in your wardrobe. Robots that organize things on a flat surface have been worked on before and this is the first robot that targets objects of different shape and size placing them on non-trivial places.

A robot that would clean up your mess back home while you’re at work

What makes the task easier for the robot is a Microsoft Kinect 3-D camera. With the camera’s help it can create graphic simulations of its surroundings, which help it determine the shape of objects and how to move them from one site to another. It creates an overall view of the room and classifies placement sites as good or bad. The robot is supposed to make mistakes as it might drop an occasional dish, or place objects atop each other in a weird way. This is expected to improve with time though as it uses learning algorithms to improve upon the mistakes it made in the past.

Via: MSNBC