This whole release is pretty weird—lots of rhetorical questions and little meat—but Dr. Raja Chatila of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is working on a robot system called the COGNITRON designed specifically to help us with our every day tasks.
Research breaks down into four capacities required by a cognitive robot companion: perception and cognition of environment; learning by observation; decision making; communication and interaction with humans.
Sounds like some pretty standard stuff, but they’re building their robots to work in homes and clutter environments and to let us know when the mail arrives, when the toast is burning, and when we need a quickie by palpitating its fleshy pink silicone bushing. Wait, what? That was part of my own research.
I Robot, your companion [Eurekalert]
