A robot known as "Cody" successfully wiped away blue candy from a test user's legs and arms without being too forceful, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology reported at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) conference last month.
The elderly and people with disabilities often have trouble with daily activities, like folding laundry, getting groceries, and even maintaining personal hygiene. Robots that can put away clean dishes or sort laundry may aid people enough to let them maintain an independent lifestyle for longer in their homes or help ease some of the burden of hospital or assisted-living workers. Now Cody has added another task to robots' repertoire of personal assistance tasks: wiping down a person too bedridden or injured to bathe themselves.