According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hill, of the Australian robotic company Kadence Photonics, has reprogrammed robots to give them some "feminine" intuition.
As wrote the author, "a robot that thinks like your mum may be running your kitchen and home sooner than you think."
Peter Hill's new method of programming robots [is] based on co-operation rather than exploitation.
He also gave fancy names to these reprogrammed robots.
Dr Hill spent two years developing his "co-operating system" that drives three robots -- Michelle, Romy and Goldie -- which use their fine motor skills to build optical fibre components.
So how exactly these "female" robots are different from traditional ones?
Unlike traditional manufacturing robots, which carry out single tasks sequentially, the three female robots are able to switch between a number of jobs according to priority and circumstance.
"If a man does the housework, he'll load the washing machine then stand there and watch it," Dr Hill said. "A woman will go off and do something else."
The benefit is that rather than setting up an entire production line for a single job, a single line can do a range of low-cost jobs simultaneously, even to the extent of every product on the line being different.
And where will this lead?
The combined traits of cooperation and multi-tasking would equip robots for a future as predicted by Rodney Brooks, the expatriate Australian who now heads the Artificial Intelligence lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mr Brooks told a Sydney audience yesterday that once robots could see and manipulate objects better, they would become widely used for home care and care of the elderly.
Source: Sue Lowe, Sydney Morning Herald, September 9, 2003
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