This Hybrid Robot Cleaner Vacuums and Mops All the Floors In Your Home

If you've got a mix of hard and carpeted floors in your home that you just don't feel like cleaning, you usually have to rely on two separate cleaning bots to get the work done. But you can write your Roomba and Scooba a letter of recommendation and send them on their way now that Moneual's new Rydis H67 promises to tackle both tasks with one machine.Given a wet mop would only serve to further muck up dirty carpets, the microfiber pad the H67 uses on hard wood and tile floors can be removed depending on what needs cleaning.Exaggerated gait allows limbless R2G2 robot to move quickly in confined spaces And the vacuum is smart enough to actually avoid carpeted surfaces while the mopping pad is attached.

On a full battery it can actually mop for about five hours straight in a back and forth zip-zag motion, but you can expect that battery life to be considerably shortened when the vacuum's motor is running. But like any good robo vac, it will automatically return to its charging station when it's running low.At $400 available at Best Buy starting today, it isn't overly expensive, either, especially considering it does the work of two devices. And as an added bonus, with only a single robo cleaner in your home, it has no one to gossip around the water cooler with and get distracted from work. From personalised searches of Google to the seductive experience of driverless cars, from educational robots that hone your French to prosthetics that are stronger and faster than our own limbs: artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionise our lives.

Now scientists, legal experts and philosophers are joining forces to scrutinise the promise of intelligent systems and wrangle over their implications. This week in Brighton, the fourth EuCogIII members' conference is set to tackle these issues head on. "Fundamentally we're interested in considering the ethical and societal impact of such systems," says Alan Winfield, professor of electronic engineering at UWE Bristol. It is time, he says, to make some crucial decisions. "If we get it wrong, there are consequences right now."It's a point well illustrated by IBM's intelligent system, Watson. Two years after thrashing human contestants at the quickfire quiz Jeopardy!, Watson has graduated from gameshows to medical school and could soon be diagnosing diseases.