Robo Butler Serves Dinner, Cleans Dishes, But Won't Have Sex

I’m not even going to bother wasting my keypad strokes on the obvious misogynistic jokes here and instead skip straight to the name of this servent: the Home Exploring Robot Butler or HERB. Which is just like “Herbert” or “marijuana” depending on how you pronounce it. Yup, little HERB here is Intel’s next big idea. Why they’ve decided to conquer the suburban kitchen? I have no idea, but just so long as it can serve me cold beer from the fridge, I’ll let it sneak by on the rent again.

The robotic butler, built as part of a collaboration with the Quality of Life Technology Center and Carnegie Mellon University, uses six multi-core computers along with multiple sensors to perform various tasks around the kitchen.

HERB has some powerful capabilities. It can serve, toss things in the trash (or recycling), sort dishes and place them in the dishwasher, and more. [Fastcompany]

Okay Intel, you’ve won me over. Whenever it is that I get one of these, I promise to be as lazy a possible and practically let it wipe my a–. Yeah dude, now I’m getting excited! This robot butler rules, QUICK SOMEBODY PUNCH ME IN THE STOMACH!!! Wait, what’s that…

But there are still plenty of issues to overcome before HERB can will be scrubbing your pots. During our demonstration, Intel programmers spent nearly 10 minutes debugging code before the HERB was finally able to grasp a container and throw it away.

Go to hell, Intel! You damn, dirty apes! First you get me all hot and bothered and then the next thing I know my heart is breaking. Well hopefully they get the bugs out of this thing and we get to report on an upgraded version soon. Besides, I need someone to serve me another warm glass of “shut the f-ck up”.

Supportive gang hand signs to dvice for the tip.