News: Gates says day of the home-help robot is near

James Randerson, science correspondent
Friday January 5, 2007
The Guardian

An office worker checks her home-gadget webpage from her work computer. The tasks she set for her home robots in the morning have all been completed: washing and ironing, vacuuming the lounge and mowing the lawn.

She orders dinner from the kitchen chefbot - sushi today, using a recipe from a Japanese website - then checks her elderly mother's house. The companionbot has given mum her medicine and helped her out of bed and into a chair.

This is the vision of the future offered by Bill Gates who, in the latest issue of Scientific American, argues that the robotics industry is on the cusp of a big expansion. He likens the current state of robotic technology to the situation in the fledgling computer industry when he and his fellow entrepreneur Paul Allen launched Microsoft in the mid-1970s.

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