Asahi giving away beer-pouring fridge-bots

Asahi Beer is giving away 5,000 personal beer-serving robots that store and cool six cans of beer and can open and serve a can on demand.

"I think the sector of home robots in general is about to boom," adds Magnus Wurzer, who organised an event featuring cocktail-making robots in Vienna, Austria in November 2005. "At the moment the home products called robots are but toys, but this will change, features will be added, production will get cheaper."

But Ronald Arkin of Georgia Institute of Technology, US, says the new contraption is a poor advertisement for home robots – which can be more sophisticated. "Home robots are already present," he told New Scientist. "Roomba and Aibo are two good examples – the former for cleaning, the latter for entertainment."

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(Thanks, Tom and Drew!)