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.

The right approach, I think

http://www.oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/Overview.html

Having glanced through the websites of several "ubiquitous computing" research groups, I think that the Oxygen project at MIT is the closest I've seen to "something on the right track" Partly I occasionally track / glance at what's happening in this field because I think it could become an interesting thing to be involved in in the future. Partly I keep looking at it because I have this sneaking suspicion that, when we start getting to pervasively embedded small computers, HCI will start looking like a robotics problem. And partly I'm interested in how the network connectivity for pervasive computing might work : perhaps the distributed robotics and ad-hoc network people have a head-start on some of the issues that might come up.

Should be of interest to some

Particularly of interest is the discussion of the "software as object" focus

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html

Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software