So you’ve been jonesin for a robot that can cook you food and wash your filthy body while you sleep.  You have some ideas about how to go about making it, but, aw man, you don’t feel like going through the boring chassis build, the stupid motor calibration, and all the other poopy work that goes into the base of all robots.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could just slap a spatula and a loofah on a pre-made robot template?  Well, friends, the uBot offers you salvation at last.  The uBot is a robot base that can be specialized…by you!

Co-founders of DigitRobotics LLC Bryan Thibodeau and Patrick Deegan will market their uBot initially to academia.  Building robots for academic purposes is a quite involved process, so having a template robot to specialize would make things much easier for researchers .
“The uBot balances on two wheels, can pick objects up with its arms, and can interact via Skype using a camera and a computer monitor for a ‘head’.”  The pair is already building three uBots for the MIT Media Lab.  MIT will use the uBot as the body and chassis for Lexi, a social/dexterous/mobile bot that can express emotion.

Ultimately the team plans to market their uBot in the health-care sector.  The uBot prototype currently costs $65,000, but manufacturing efficiency could bring that price down to about $30,000.  Having an in-house robot to care for the elderly at all times could eliminate the need for a nursing home.  And with a $30K price point, the uBot might be a viable alternative to a geriatric rest home.  In a health-care scenario, the uBot would be able to check vital signs, lift someone who has fallen, call an ambulance, clear things out of the way, etc.

Happy 90th birthday grandma, I got you what you always wanted:  a machine in lieu of human interaction.

[Mass High Tech]