52 Just ordinAry robots
unstructuredenvironment. Another recent household device, Tubie
the ironing robot, has become available for U.S. $1100.* With Tubie,
the process of ironing is also redened. Tubie is in fact a doll over
which the consumer pulls the garment. en a motor inates the
doll, and hot air is blown all through the garment. It thus takes about
5minutes per garment before the ironing program is over. In contrast
with the dishwasher, although we do not have to iron, we must be
constantly present during the process to pull the clothing on and o
the doll and guide the deation process. erefore, Tubie does not
fully take over the job, and consequently ironing in this way takes
even longer than if we had used the old-fashioned steam iron.
e process of rationalizing the environment also applies to the
vacuum-cleaning robot, as we have already seen, which we call room-
barization. Before using the robot, the environment needs to be pre-
pared so that the robot can do the task properly without, for example,
sucking up a sales receipt. When cleaning up the room, we nd all
kinds of stu that we may or may not throw out or move—a loose
Lego brick is thrown back into the Lego box, a sales receipt on the
oor is perhaps not just vacuumed up, but we rst check whether we
still need to keep it for guarantee purposes. ese are all decisions that
are impossible (especially for the time being) for a vacuum- cleaning
robot to make. To enable them to make these decisions, engineers
are trying to make robots smarter by connecting them to a cognitive
control system. e international robotics project “Web-Enabled and
Experience-Based Cognitive Robots at Learn Complex Everyday
Manipulation,” from 2011,
†
funded by the European Commission, has
had this aim. Such cognitive controls allow robots to pick up infor-
mation available on the Internet and transfer it into proper behavior.
ink of web instructions, online dictionaries, and online encyclo-
pedias. In this way, a household robot—as is expected—could even
learn to cook simple dishes based on recipes found on the web. In
addition, numerous robotic technology–based domotics solutions (see
Chapter 3) and ambient intelligence (Aarts & Encarnação, 2006)
‡
*
www.ironing-machines-tubie.com/.
†
ias.cs.tum.edu/research/robohow.
‡
In ambient intelligence, the emphasis is more on increasing comfort for humans (cre-
ating smart homes, etc.) than on a robot’s specic actions. Further equipping robots
with intelligent functionality we can perhaps le under the label ambient intelligence.