In 2020 every Korean household will have a robot

Beginning next year Koreans will have the option to buy their own personal robot for a price of 1000$ – 2000$. The robots have lots of functions, some include cleaning rooms, home monitoring and reading books.

Some even have the ability to recharge electricity automatically and order a variety of foods using a local information network.

The price of the robots is cheap, mainly due to the fact that most processes are directed from the outside using wireless connections to communicate with the robot whose sensing and processing functions are maintained by a web connection.

“Like downloading a variety of software to personal computers via the broadband pipeline, most sensing and processing programs will be downloaded to URC robots, said Oh Sang-rok, MIC project manager who is in charge of the URC scheme.

Update: It is now six years after the initial announcement that every South-Korean household will have their own robot in 2020. And while it is still to early to tell if the projection will become reality, it is rather unlikely that it will come true. With eight years to go, and no real robots in sight right now, it is more likely that analysts will have to recalculate the projection to take into account the new parameters.

Eight years is on the other hand a long time, and with technology advancing at a rapid pace it is likely that first generation robots may be released in that time. That is, if you do not count cleaning robots that are already available to the first generation.

It is still a long way to go from cleaning robots to robots that offer a bigger functionality.

Here are videos that have been posted recently on YouTube that demonstrate today’s robotics technology.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Monday October 31, 2005 -
Tags:future, robots, Science