Robots Finally Learning to Clean the Bathroom

A useful general home robot, as far as I’m concerned, needs to be able to do three things: fold laundry, wash dishes, and clean toilets. That’s all it would take to make me happy. We’ve seen some attempts at both laundry foldingand washing dishes, but not a lot of bathroom cleaning. Now, thanks to the World Robot Summit (WRS) in Japan, robots are finally tackling this task. As part of a competition held at the event, robots had to clean water from around a toilet and clean trash off the floor. Team Homer at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, managed to get things done with a TIAGo mobile manipulator that you could (almost) picture cleaning up your bathroom as well.

During the competition, judges randomly sprinkled water on and around a toilet. Teams had to clean at least 80 percent of the liquid and remove trash from the floor in order to get full points. The video below shows Team Homer’s run with a PAL Robotics TIAGo:

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spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/robots-finally-learning-to-clean-the-bathroom

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