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Retiree Maurizio Feraboli taps a grocery list into a tablet and sends wheeled robots to retrieve food from a store near his apartment outside Pisa, Italy. His neighbor Wanda Mascitelli directs robots to grab the trash from her kitchen and drop it into a dumpster on her street. A robot also warns Mascitelli about a possible gas leak and later brings her a glass of water and a bottle of vitamins.

These scenes are from a video promoting the European research project Robot-Era, which recently concluded the world’s largest real-life trial of robot aides for the elderly. About 160 seniors in Italy and Sweden tested the robots during the four-year project, which received €6.5 million ($7.2 million) from the European Commission and €2.2 million from partners including Italian manufacturer Robotech and Apple supplier STMicroelectronics. Now Robot-Era manager Filippo Cavallo and fellow professors at the BioRobotics Institute at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies outside Pisa have started a company called Co-Robotics to commercialize the technology. “The robots in the video are ready” for more testing, says Cavallo, who plans to start selling them as soon as next year.

Read the full original article: www.bloomberg.com

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