No pictures for this yet, but after conquering nursing homes, schools and hospitals, Japan’s robots are finally ready to get into office spaces, too. Fujitsu’s new and yet to be named gofer robot is an all-round talent, designed to be used mainly during office hours. It can move among the staff and actually gets work done as well.
The Fujitsu robot is jointly developed with major Japanese furniture maker Okamura and a team of university researchers. It’s being described as cylindrical, 120cm tall, it weighs 60kg and has a diameter of 62cm. After feeding it with a given office’s layout, it can move around the office by itself (at 1.2m per second) and stops whenever it comes as close as 10cm to a person or object.
The robo gofer is equipped with a camera and a set of sensors so it can avoid obstacles. Needless to say it’s connected to the web and features an LCD touch screen so that human colleagues can quickly search for stuff on Google, for example. Fujitsu also thought of a shelf space in the robot’s body so you can make it carry letters or copier paper from one colleague to the other.
Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]
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