Robot butlers are coming to this downtown hotel. Is Miami ready for robo-room service?
Welcome to the 21st century, where a request for extra towels in your hotel room may be answered by a roughly 4-foot-high purple robot on wheels.
Miami YotelPad — an unfinished 30-story mixed-use development in downtown Miami — will employ three robot butlers for its guests. These robots don’t look like humans (thankfully?), but they’re programmed to execute tasks normally left to their biological counterparts: delivering room service, playing music and even engaging in conversation.
This Robot Will Hunt Lionfish to Save Coral Reefs
The invasive species might soon meets its mechanical match.
Usually animal preservation is a passive effort, creating protected zones or taking other measures to protect plants and animals from humans. But scientists and students at the Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts want to help protect coral reefs from an invasive species in a more aggressive fashion: They’re building a robot designed to autonomously hunt for and harvest lionfish threatening coral reefs.
Lionfish have threatened coral reefs off American and Caribbean coasts for years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes them as “flexible predators potentially capable of reducing the abundance of a wide variety of native reef-associated fishes.”
Native to the Indo-Pacific and Middle East, lionfish have distinctive features which make them prized aquarium pets. After likely being dumped into the Atlantic by owners who no longer value them, their eggs have the Gulf Stream southbound to allowing them to become vicious predators amidst shrimp, small crabs, Nassau grouper and yellowtail snapper, just to name a few species who have come under attack.
- Scientists are developing a robot to replace human strawberry pickers at farms
- A fifth of fruits aren’t being picked due to a shortage of workers following Brexit
- Demand for strawberries has skyrocketed over the last 22 years with people in the UK consuming 101,000 tonnes yearly, up from 67,000 in 1996
Experts are developing a robot to replace human strawberry pickers as farms struggle to find workers due to Brexit.
Around 20 per cent of soft fruits are going to waste due to a shortage of workers, University of Essex researchers say.
This will worsen when Britain leaves the EU, scientist claim, which has led to farms looking for alternate solutions to harvest crops.