Slashdot Mirror
House-Sitting Robot Hits Store Shelves in Japan
Eh-Wire writes "Roborior, a house-sitting robot armed with a digital camera, infrared sensors, and a videophone is on sale in select Japanese department stores. The house-sitting robot can detect break-ins with its infrared sensors and then call the owners cell phone and stream video to the tiny screen. At $2600 each the Roborior is not cheap. For those that require something a little more substantial, Tmusk, the manufacturer of Roborior, has produced a four legged version called Banryu. This one is the size of a large dog and sells for around $18,000. It's not supposed to shed hair or sleep on the furniture which could make it quite popular."
Someone else mentioned putting cameras in every room, and the reality is that's already trivial. You can even use free software to detect image changes that might be burglars and send those images to a safe remote location.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
for the fees you would pay for this robot, you could install very well concealed nanny cams and a premium grade professionally monitored security system (think brinks).
The bot should be targeted at those who can't afford this kind of system, which would mean it should NOT be the most valuable thing in the house. With that kind of price tag however, anyone who breaks in will most certainly steal the bot first. I know I would If I decided to rob a place which employed one.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
No. The police will ignore you unless there's a guard on the property who has confirmed that he has a burglar caught. There's absolutely no point for the police to up and rush over to your place whenever the wind blows your curtain and a motion detector goes off.
In Seattle, the police will come if your alarm goes off and your alarm company cannot get ahold of you. If it is a false alarm, they fine you $100. Regardless, you have to pay $40/year to the city if you have an alarm system that calls the police. The fines and yearly fees were inacted because of false alarms. Most alarm companies have stopped pushing things like motion detectors that had a high false positive occurance.
While I'm on the subject and replying to my own post.... I might add that it would be fun for iRobot or Sony or somebody to include software with their robots that allows the USER to program a general layout of their house. The computer algorythm can worry about obstacle avoidance, but having a hard coded map would be VERY handy. I'd take the time to program my Roomba to know where all the walls are and do a good job cleaning my house... heck it'd be a lot easy than programming IBM Via Voice to help me with my college term papers (back in the day)..... I think I spent more time training it and fixing my computer than working on the paper! Well, its just a thought.
I really don't see the market for this in the states, but maybe some strange social forces exist in Japan that make this worthwhile. They are in love with robots after all over there. Usually in my area if someone worries about someone breaking into their house over an extended period of time, they hire a house-sitter; a highschool or college student who gets some independence, a place to live, and some cash as well as a house full of appliences in exchange for keeping up with the lawn and garden/shoveling/what-have-you. A summer of house-sitting would probably cost less than $1200 (Yes, I did pull this out of my butt). If they're going to be gone a really long time they move their things into storage and rent the house out and make money instead of spending it.
Then again, what do I know about the strange way of the Japanese people
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
There is very little crime in the manner of home break-ins and street mugging in Japan. So a 'house-sitting robot' should best call the owner to determine what the issue is before calling the police.
If it is determined that a crime is happening, then the police can be called. The crimes are recorded and the criminals can be captured. Eventually the robot makers will figure out that the recordings of the crimes should not be stored in the robot itself since the criminals will be destroying the robot pronto after breaking into the house.
Japan has a lot more social cohesion than the US or Europe. People and police generally know who the criminals are. Street criminals can expect to get caught. It establishes credibility for a job as soldier in the major white-collar organized-crime syndicates of Japan. I know, that doesn't seem too bright, but street criminals usually aren't that bright.