Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Robot household cleanup and RFID

What if every thing in your house that wasn't trash had an RFID tag?

Your household swarm of cleanup robots could potentially pick up every item. If the item doesn't come with an RFID tag, it goes in the trash/recycling/etc. (telling these apart might be hard). If it does come with an RFID tag, there's a household database that tells your robots where the thing goes when it gets put away.

I suppose this wouldn't solve all the problems with "program robots to clean your house" but it sure seems like a big first step. (It might be worth testing any proposed solution to the "robots clean your house" problem with the "the baby just defecated on the floor" thought experiment)

(food items would be an interesting issue, the RFID tag would have to have some sort of expiration information, and when the food gets thrown out / composted/recycled, the RFID tag has to be removed for later reuse. Things like shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes present similar issues.)

P.S. If any readers find similar ideas posted elsewhere, please post links to the more interesting write-ups in the comments section.

6 comments:

  1. That is a pretty awesome idea.

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  2. After swapping out my openid server, and holding blogger by the hand to find it, I managed to finally log in. (Funny, Blogger works fine for every other openid I have, and my previous server worked fine with everyone except Blogger. Damn Google.)

    If you're using RFID for this, You're Doing It Wrong™. Computer vision is the way handle this, and you're going to need CV anyway if you want the robot to grab and manipulate objects. Right now you can download iPhone apps like http://snaptell.com/ that recognize images of products and barcodes. The robot knows that the object in front of him is expired milk because the object looks like a milk jug, has the word "milk" written on it, and has a date in the past stamped on the top. This technology exists today. While I haven't used Snap Tell, it apparently works fairly well for at least a set of objects. I could see that you might need markers for navigation, but if we're already recognizing products, I don't know how much of a leap it takes to recognize "trashcan".

    Of course I'm still amazed that object recognition works at all.

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