New Toyota HSR

Our friends at PlasticPals have just published a nice overview of the new Toyota Human Support Robot, or HSR.  HSR is designed to assist people with limited mobility complete common tasks around the home, like picking up the remote control or fetching boxes from shelves.  It has a clever telescoping design, that allows it to adjust its height, and a single arm that folds up into its side when not needed.  The end of the arm also has a clever design combining a standard gripper with a suction cup for flat things like papers and books, that would be very hard to grasp. 

In addition to the PlasticPals review, you can read more about HSR at The Verge, a post at ROS.org (which points out that HSR runs the open-source Robot Operating System), as well as gizmag.  Er, and then there’s Engadget, IEEE Spectrum, and even Phys.org.  But I hadn’t blogged about it yet, and was starting to feel left out.  Enjoy the video (uploaded by Kazumichi Moriyama).