There is a new robot vacuum cleaner in Silicon Valley: the Neato XV-11 is officially launched and aims to take the place of the Roomba, the champion in in the robot vacuum cleaner class. To overcome the Roomba, Neato solve old problems that iRobot (the company behind the Roomba) has never really improved (due to lack of competition).




The ROLA (Robot Of Living Aid) is an intelligent home-care robot has been developed by the National Chiao Tung University of Taiwan. Able to understand Mandarin, Taiwanese and a little bit of English, ROLA keeps an eye on the elderly occupants of a home and it can send distress messages automatically in the event of an accident to a family mobile phone or call an ambulance. This is possible thanks to its live video feed, which allows people to differentiate between a true emergency and a false alarm. Price: for now, it costs about $100,000.


