Robot Babysitter Entertains The Kiddies March 26, 2008

Read more Entertainment , Gadgets , Gizmodo UK , Robots , Technology

Those wacky Japanese. Robots are becoming more common in everyday life in the Land of the Rising Sun but now they’ve created a robot to baby-sit your kids while you shop.

Aeon, a major retailer in the city of Fukuoka, has brought in a 1.4m tall yellow and white robot, developed by Tmusk, to keep the rugrats happy while the parents spend their money without all the usual coat-pulling and tantrums.

Parents wanting offload their kids get a special badge from the store which the robot can use to identify the kids via a barcode. It can even talk to the kids but the vocabulary is limited. One of its eyes is a projector for firing ad messages onto walls, or images it has captured from the camera that acts as its other eye.

Unless he can fire Pixar movies on the shop walls, dish out free Coke & Snickers and tell dirty jokes, this lump of tin wouldn’t last 10 minutes with the cherubs in my local shopping centre.-Martin Lynch

[Montreal Gazette]

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