Like the U.S., South Korea is a country fretting over a sizeable baby boomer population fast becoming senior citizens. Solution? Why, robots!
According to a UPI article yesterday from The Korea Times, scientists at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology are developing a voice-recognition robot, dubbed H-Robot 1.0, that will care for the elderly. When it’s completed circa 2013, it will be able to monitor heart rate and blood pressure, order takeout food, clean the house and “summon help in an emergency when its owner falls to floor and doesn’t get up,” according to researcher Kim Mun-Sang, just like a LifeCall device on wheels.
Meanwhile, Samsung recently finished developing a robot that can help out the booming Korean population by rubbing some of it out. Known as the Samsung Techwin SGR-A1, it can autonomously track humans and fire an automatic weapon at them. According to Robots.net, the robot sentries will be deployed next year along the DMZ between North and South Korea, replacing 650,000 South Korean troops.
Samsung’s spec page includes the rendering shown above and lists all sorts of juicy features, such as “laser range finder,” “Intruder recognition and identification using xoom-in [sic],” even a “weapon antitheft device,” which I imagine sounds like one of those annoying repeating-pattern car alarms.
Jeez, didn’t mankind learn anything from the ED-209 and the SAINT? The nerds at Samsung apparently at least Nexflixed Short Circuit because they’ve picked up the SAINT’s spindly wickedness as well as the Evil Glowing Red Eye that’s been a hallmark of evil computers and robots for years.
