Among the products revealed at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show was BellaBot from Chinese firm PuduTech. BellaBot is the automated cat waiter robot with attitude that you didn’t know you needed.
BellaBot mews when it arrives at tables to encourage customers to pick up their food. And if diners stroke BellaBot’s ears, it initially reacts with pleasure.
“The owner’s hand is so warm,” the bot is programmed to say in response.
But if customers continue petting it for too long, its expression changes.
“It gets mad to remind you not to interrupt its job,” explains maker PuduTech.
Also demonstrated at CES 2020 was RollBot, whose sole function is to immediately ferry a fresh roll of toilet paper to you when your roll runs out.
A word of caution may be appropriate here: If RollBot ever achieves sentience, then it may prove vulnerable to despair. It’s not as if we hadn’t been warned:
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.