Robots Finally Learning to Clean the Bathroom

A useful general home robot, as far as I’m concerned, needs to be able to do three things: fold laundry, wash dishes, and clean toilets. That’s all it would take to make me happy. We’ve seen some attempts at both laundry folding and washing dishes, but not a lot of bathroom cleaning. Now, thanks to the World Robot Summit (WRS) in Japan, robots are finally tackling this task. As part of a competition held at the event, robots had to clean water from around a toilet and clean trash off the floor. Team Homer at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, managed to get things done with a TIAGo mobile manipulator that you could (almost) picture cleaning up your bathroom as well.