Nabot Is a Robot You Can Train to Do Your Chores Autonomously

The iRobot Roomba line of robotic vacuum cleaners has proven two things: we have no problem living without robots in our homes and we’re lazy. So long as it can make our lives a bit easier, we’ll gladly shell out the cash for a robot to do our chores for us. Sadly, your Roomba can’t do anything except vacuum. It sure would be nice if there was a robot that could do more. Fortunately the new Nabot robot is designed for that and you can train it to perform a variety of household tasks.

The Nabot crowdfunding campaign just recently launched on Kickstarter and has already reached more than twice its funding goal. It’s a rover that is equipped with a robotic arm and which you can control from your smartphone. It has a built-in camera, so you can see a first-person view as you drive the robot around and carry items from room to room. That alone would be cool, but not groundbreaking. The feature that makes Nabot really stand out is the trainable AI that can learn how to handle specific tasks and then complete them autonomously.

As you control Nabot via the smartphone app, its AI will learn what you’re asking of it. It can, for example, figure out that every time you tell it to pick up your kid’s toy car, it should place the car in the toy bin. That can be complemented with more explicit code with a block-based programming language or a Python AI. If you aren’t interested in doing any programming yourself, you can download code from the Nabot community to handle particular jobs. All of the actual artificial intelligence processing is done locally on your smartphone, so you don’t have to worry about the privacy concerns associated with cloud processing.

If you want your Nabot, the Kickstarter campaign will be running until August 10th. Early birds can get a single Nabot for $259 ($190 off the expected retail price). Rewards are expected to be delivered in January of 2021.