A robotic assistant that looks like a coffee table on the move

What if you hooked the Roomba under the table…

How do you imagine a robot-assistant that brings a meme glass of water in old age and serves your favorite magazine while its owner is comfortably seated in an armchair? Probably as a sci-fi humanoid droid, right? Well, the Japanese startup sees this scenario differently – instead of a two-legged machine with movable arms, they propose … a moving coffee table.

Kachaka, an intelligent table on wheels

Elon Musk has his own Optimus and believes that humanoid robo-helpers will be in every home by 2050. The Japanese company Preferred Robotics seems to share this view, but their robot is far from the vision of the owner of Tesla. They have created a device supported by artificial intelligence, which is to be used in every home in the future. It will bring a glass of water, a book, medicines and… basically anything the user asks for. “Bring” is the key word in this case, because the robot has neither arms nor legs – instead, it attaches itself to a table on wheels and uses it to deliver the desired items.

It looks like a smart vacuum cleaner and works on a similar principle. It is equipped with a camera system that scans the surroundings, and the recorded image is analyzed by AI in such a way that the robot does not hit furniture or other household members. The set called Kachaka consists of two elements – the aforementioned robot and a table on wheels. Isn’t that how we imagined innovative robots for home use?

It may be silly, but it’s expensive!

Kachaka responds to voice commands, and then attaches itself to the table and in this form travels towards the owner. The thing is that you have to put the items on the table beforehand, so if you want the robot to bring you coffee to bed, you have to put the coffee on it yourself first. No sense? A bit like that, but you can program it in such a way that it comes to a specific place in the apartment at a selected time, but I still can’t find a use for it. It is also important that the robot cannot cope with larger thresholds, not to mention climbing stairs.

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The robot weighs 10 kilograms and can carry objects up to 20 kilograms (including the table) while moving at a speed of 80 centimeters per second. All these shortcomings would be relatively understandable if not for the prohibitive price. Kachaka was valued at $ 1,800, or about PLN 7.5 thousand.

That’s not all – users also have access to a dedicated application for planning the robot’s routes, but they have to pay 980 yen per month, which is about PLN 30. This is quite a price for a device with such limited functionality. If you teach Roomba from iRobot to attach to the table, it would do the same for less money, and it would also vacuum the floor.