Sure this little Fujitsu Robot (HOAP-2) may not look as exciting as the terminator but it too can be very useful! A team of researchers from Italy and Japan, lead by Dr. Petar Kormushev, has taught a Japanese humanoid robot how to clean a whiteboard. The approach that the team developed is called “upper-body kinesthetic teaching”, and can be applied to a wide variety of vertical surface related tasks, such as window cleaning, wall painting, wallpaper fitting, drawing on a wall, etc. And, the advantage of having a full-body humanoid robot means that it can do much more than, say, a Roomba vacuum-cleaning robot.

The research was conducted as a part of Italian-Japanese collaboration between the Italian Institute of Technology and Tokyo City University and will be presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in May 2011 in Shanghai, China.