孤立する老人に生物型ロボットペットを配給したある研究では、1年後に参加者の70％で孤独感が減っていたという。高齢者の増加とそれをケアする現役世代の減少という現実のなか、高齢者向けのソーシャルロボットが普及することは、かえって「人間によるケア」を望むことのハードルを上げてしまうという懸念もある。高齢の当事者たちがますますロボットに親密さや愛情を見出すなかで、プライヴァシーやセキュリティ、また倫理的な問題をいかに社会は受け止めるべきなのか。生物型ロボット…
Why Amazon built a home robot
iRobot’s CEO once told me, with a wink, that he didn’t become a truly successful roboticist until he became a vacuum salesman. It’s a good line, and one that betrays some fundamental truths about the industry. Robots are hard, and in a lot of ways home robots are doubly so. That no one has managed […]
孤独な老人のために生物型ロボットペットができること（とできないこと）：前篇
孤独はあらゆる世代に蔓延する「疫病」であると宣言され、パンデミックは高齢者の孤立を加速させた。その対策として、米国では日帰り介護や食事提供施設の代わりに、2万体以上のアニマトロニクス（生物型ロボット）ペットを配布している。研究によれば、60日間ロボットペットと交流した高齢者は楽観的になり、「目的意識」が芽生え、ときには孤独感も減るのだという。生物型ロボットペットの最前線を前後篇で追う。
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Attack of the $200M robotic raises
How’s this for a bit of regional synchronicity? This week, a pair of Chinese robotics firms secured $200 million rounds. It’s all part of a booming ecosystem that we get some insight into every so often. There are so many players in China’s robotics space it can be hard to keep track of some of […]
RoboDeck is a robot that keeps your house’s deck looking good
If your house has a wooden deck, keeping it in good shape is costly and time consuming. If you don’t keep up with the regular maintenance, it becomes even more costly and time consuming to fix — or, eventually, it all just starts to rot and fall apart. We’ve got robots that can clean our […]
EarthOptics helps farmers look deep into the soil for big data insights
Farming sustainably and efficiently has gone from a big tractor problem to a big data problem over the last few decades, and startup EarthOptics believes the next frontier of precision agriculture lies deep in the soil. Using high-tech imaging techniques, the company claims to map the physical and chemical composition of fields faster, better, and […]
The next healthcare revolution will have AI at its center
Human life expectancy increased from 31 years in 1900 to 72 years in 2017. Today, we are on the cusp of another healthcare revolution driven by artificial intelligence.
Boston Dynamics owner Hyundai deploys Spot for factory safety monitoring
Back in June, Hyundai completed a deal for controlling interest in Boston Dynamics. The Korean automotive giant no doubt has some grand plans for integrating the Massachusetts-based firm’s technology into a lot of their forward-looking concept mobility vehicles — for now, however, it’s more about putting existing robots to work. Hyundai today announced the arrival […]
Tiger’s bullish robotic investments
On Tuesday, Tiger Global led not one but two big funding rounds, announcing its role in a $26 million Series A for Ambi and an additional $50 million for Locus Robotics. The firm has been so active in investing of late, that neither one of these companies cracked Alex’s coveted “Today’s Tiger round” in our […]
The newest Roomba gets smarter as it vacuums
The Roomba is easily among the most ubiquitous robots in the world — but it has never been one of the smartest. On the whole, that’s not a major issue. The top-selling vacuum is good at what it does: cleaning floors. But a roboticist’s work is never done; iRobot has turned the vast majority of […]