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Honda's Miimo robotic lawn mower beats the heat, won't pour your lemonade
If you're looking to plan ahead for next summer's grueling yard chores, Honda has something that will help you sweat a bit less. The company has unveiled Miimo, a robotic lawn mower that trims 2-3mm of grass in several shifts during the course of a week. The green-thumbed robot navigates with a combination of controls, timers and sensors while working inside the constraints of a buried boundary wire. As you might expect, you'll be able to ditch the gas can as well thanks to a lithium-ion battery and docking station (similar to a Roomba). If you're worried about adjustments, cutting height can be set between 20mm (0.79 inches) and 60mm (2.36 inches) with three operation modes will suite the size of each job. When the unit arrives in Europe in early 2013, 300 and 500 models will be available sporting monikers that indicate their respective maximum cut perimeter in meters (about 328 yard for the former and 547 yards for the latter). For a few more details, head on past the break for the full PR.
Toshiba's ApriPetit portable robotic interface solves household problems, melts your heart
Remember ApriPoco? It's okay, we'll forgive you if not, but we can't say the same about a similar question asked about that fellow above here in a few years. With a heart and soul as warm as that found in Wall-E, Toshiba's newly-unveiled ApriPetit is around half as large as the aforesaid predecessor, standing just 5.9-inches tall and sporting a pair of eyes capable of staring straight through your being. It's described as a "portable robotic interface," able to understand and act on voice commands using a combination of speech recognition and text-to-speech software. The eyes themselves are said to double as "stereo cameras, which can find and recognize faces and determine how close they are." As of now, there doesn't seem to be any hard-and-fast plans for use, but it's clear that home health and service is an area of interest. Of course, we'd buy one just to converse with -- Malkovich has Siri; we'll take this cutey.
