{"id":60709,"date":"2012-09-26T11:30:42","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T09:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=60709"},"modified":"2012-09-26T15:30:17","modified_gmt":"2012-09-26T13:30:17","slug":"toyota-introduces-robot-helper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/gadgets\/60709-toyota-introduces-robot-helper.html","title":{"rendered":"Toyota introduces robot helper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Japanese car giant Toyota<\/a> on Wednesday unveiled a robotic best friend that can offer a helping hand around the house fetching and carrying for the elderly or immobile.<\/p>\n

The human support robot, a compact cylinder-shaped machine 37 centimetres (about 15 inches) in diameter and up to 130 centimetres tall, can be remotely controlled by a tablet computer to recognise items it is sent to fetch.<\/p>\n

Taking their cue from dogs that are trained to retrieve things, Toyota engineers designed the robot to perform simple tasks on command, using an arm equipped with a small suction pad.<\/p>\n

“The robot still has challenges such as selecting items from a drawer containing all sorts of things, for example,” said Takashi Yamamoto, general manager at Toyota’s advanced technology engineering department.<\/p>\n

“Finding an item by itself before getting it to the person controlling it is the most difficult challenge,” he said.<\/p>\n

Toyota, one of the world’s biggest automakers, has applied technology developed for its cars, such as precise control of motors at high speeds, in the design of the robots.<\/p>\n

Products catering to the elderly are big business in Japan, where a declining birth-rate and lengthening life-expectancy is creating a greying society.<\/p>\n

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Robots crawl in bodies to assist surgery<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new robotic assistant is unveiled by Toyota <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":60711,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[36,6266,15747,15749,11919],"class_list":["post-60709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gadgets","tag-active","tag-robot","tag-robot-hand","tag-robotic-assistant","tag-toyota"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60709"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60743,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60709\/revisions\/60743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}