The Robot Future

Channel 4’s recent drama Humans portrayed a parallel reality where frighteningly realistic human-looking robots live amongst families as domestic servants, cleaning, cooking, and generally doing anything their owners demanded.

Technology may not have advanced as far in the real world, but there are quite a few companies out there developing robots that could help us with the chores around the home. Many people will be aware of, or maybe even own a roving vacuum cleaner, but there are other other devices coming our way.

Irobot also make the Looj which scoots through your guttering like a little tank, getting rid of all the soggy leaves and other gunk that block up the pipe an cause problems.

Evovacs have developed an automatic window cleaner, the Winbot which uses suction to crawl around a window, and combines wet and dry cleaning action to keep the glass sparkling.

Grillbot is a tough little thing with wire brush rollers which shuffles around your BBQ and does the dirty work of cleaning it for you. That said, we’re not sure how much use that is going to be for Britain, especially given this summer and how few opportunities there have been to even have a BBQ in the first place!

If you’ve got a lovely garden but too busy to water it (again, this may not have been a problem this year), Droplet is a device that you feed in the layout of your garden and which plants you have, and then it automatically waters each bit to just the amount it needs. As it’s internet connected, it’ll even hold off giving the plants a squirting if there’s rain forecast.

For those that may struggle with heavier loads, Budgee is essentially a motorised platform that will follow the owner around, taking all the effort out of moving things around. A shopping trolley for the 21st Century, perhaps?

No doubt lots more clever devices are under development in an effort to make the home truly labour free, but we think it’s still going to be quite some time before the human factor is going to be taken out of the equation when it comes to keeping our lives clean and tidy.

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