Found at news.cornell.edu, it's a robot that can pick up after us. Excerpt:
Researchers in Cornell's Personal Robotics Lab have trained a robot to survey a room, identify all the objects, figure out where they belong and put them away.
Apparently, it takes a little bit of training to start it off so that the robot knows characteristics of each object. It uses a Microsoft Kinect 3-D camera to get an overall view of the room. Then the computer decides where the loose objects go. Another excerpt:
The researchers tested placing dishes, books, clothing and toys on tables and in bookshelves, dish racks, refrigerators and closets. The robot was up to 98 percent successful in identifying and placing objects it had seen before. It was able to place objects it had never seen before, but success rates fell to an average of 80 percent. Ambiguously shaped objects, such as clothing and shoes, were most often misidentified.
Via Kurzweilai.net.
What I need is a robot that can work with paper. Here's the way I envision it. The user dumps a stack of paper into a container that looks like a waste basket. The robot retrieves and scans each page, then the robot files away the digitized version into appropriate, easy to find folders on the user's computer. The scanner uses OCR so that the words are searchable just in case they don't get organized they way the user expects. A more expensive option would file the papers into labeled file folders and place them in a file cabinet. The cheaper model merely shreds them.
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