On the home front, a house-cleaning robot is much desired, as is a searching contraption that would find lost keys and books--sort of like Google, but for the physical world.

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On the home front, a house-cleaning robot is much desired, as is a searching contraption that would find lost keys and books--sort of like Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), but for the physical world.

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Is there a robot in the house?

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From the Japanese automobile maker Honda, the ASIMO robot was an in-house project throughout the 2000s, and was taller than the QRIO by two feet and weighed more than three times more.

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I.e. the dual-cameras on the HOM-BOT can show you where the robot is, and mapping presents a display of its path through the house.

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That's not to say every bot was on its best behavior: The University of Central Florida's robot confused a driveway for a road, parking itself at an abandoned house.

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More broadly, if manufacturers are struggling to keep their handset launch schedules in sync with Google's in-house development, it's no wonder that Android skins seem so unsympathetic to the green robot's natural complexion.

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Research conducted by Cisco, which has experimented with telepresence robots in house, found that employees were, oddly, more honest and open with a human-operated robot than with a human colleague.

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