You want a butler robot, admit it, there is nothing better than being babied by those nice cold robot pincers. Lay back and grab a beer while you fantasize about  your own personal robot butler, you can even name him Hal.

5. Home Made Butler Bots:

Beer toting, wheel mounted, mini fridges catering to your every thirsty need. There are numerous homemade butlers around, but the highest profile one (aka the one I’ve seen on youtube more than thrice) is “Chives” from Narobo. He, or she I suppose, can pour drinks and store your frosty beverage in its mini-fridge stomach. Check it out:

I wouldn’t mind having a voice controlled tap.

4. Twendy One:

This robot doesn’t specialize in beer, but it does have a lot of more useful abilities, if that’s any consolation. Twendy One is a fully autonomous butler Robot destined for Japanese retirement homes. It can offer a helping hand to the bed ridden, by helping them into a wheel chair or wheeling over to the kitchen to make some toast or grab a glass of milk. Want a straw? No problem each of Twendy’s hands have 13 degrees of freedom, allowing him to easily manipulate a straw without even crushing it.

Twendy One could be the first real robot butler, cooking, cleaning, laundry, all done. Just sit back and relax. Unfortunately, Twendy One has an unwieldy hunger for power, and has yet to function without being constantly attached to the wall by an arm thick power cable.

3. Herb: A Home Exploring Robotic Butler:

Herb is an advanced stage Robot Butler that runs a number of learning algorithms to discover its environment and learn how to interact with you and how to help. Rather than focusing on building a library of actions for the robot butler to do, researchers at Intel are teaching Herb from the ground up, hoping to create a perfect robot butler.

I could use one of these!

2. Space Dwarf ASIMO:

Unlike Herb, ASIMO is a full fledged humanoid robot capable of climbing stairs and playing football (the world cup kind). Honda’s big win with the ASIMO is the fact that it can operate autonomously with a human like range of motion. Further, now that ASIMO has a new AI capable of learning it is on pace to be one of the first commercially viable robot butlers.

Honda’s space dwarf on Top Gear:

1. Roomba

Okay, so Roombas arn’t really robot butlers, not yet at least. But, it’s damn close. For, $300 bucks the Roomba cleans your house and provides hours of entertainment. Further, the Roomba has a large market share in the US, where adoption of butler bots will be hindered by social stigmas against robots.

Further, the Roomba has a large fan base of part time hackers and modders all competing to do the most creative things with their beloved Roombas. How long before modders figure out how to turn the roomba into a full fledged $300 butler?

Hell, it can already play the role of parent, what more do you want from a robot butler?!

Photos: Flickr|1