A new robot from Panasonic will soon be dispensing medication in Japanese hospitals.

The robot won't actually be making decisions as to which medications patients should receive, I'm glad to say. It'll basically be an electronic filing cabinet on wheels. The hospital pharmacist will load the small drawers with the medication each patient requires and the robot will then travel round the wards delivering the drugs. The robot is expected to be able to do the rounds in half the time it would take a human.

Panasonic will initially be selling the robot to hospitals in Japan only but hope eventually to introduce the unit to Europe and the rest of the world.

We've been able to buy domestic robotic lawnmowers for a while now. But what do you do if you need to tend the grass on something larger than the average garden? Like, say, a golf course.

Enter the RG3, currently being tested at golf courses in Florida and Indiana. This rather imposing looking robot lawnmower has been created by PrecisePath (formerly IndyRobotics) specifically to mow the grass on golf courses. The RG3 uses a Local Positioning System (LPS) to identify its location and orientation on the green together with a laser sensor to detect and avoid obstacles.

The RG3 is only the start of what could be a whole fleet (army?) of industrial scale robotic gardeners. PrecisePath has plans to develop a wide range of robots to bring "automation for the outdoors" to a variety of different spaces including sports fields, corporate and public spaces.

The global market for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to grow rapidly over the next few years and exceed $36 billion by 2015. That's the conclusion of a new report by Global Industry Analysts (GIA).

The report, Artificial Intelligence: A Global Strategic Business Report, looks at "the prevailing trends, issues, demand forecasts, and activities that affect the industry". According to GIA:

AI holds immense promise in the present and the future, with practical AI-based applications benefiting innumerable industrial as well as commercial domains.

The largest growing segment of the market is expected to be expert systems, with artificial neural networks coming second. In terms of applications the Business Intelligence (BI) market is seen as the largest and fastest growing, followed by Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Many of the things that we humans take for granted are notoriously difficult for robots. One of these is simply finding their way round an unknown building. Despite the sophisticated sensor technology and availability of GPS etc, human buildings are “messy”. People walk around in them, leave things laying around and do inconsiderate things such as closing doors. That makes it difficult for the robot AI to build up a coherent picture of its surroundings.

Tartalo is an attempt to solve these problems. A project by the Department of Computational Sciences and Artificial Intelligence at Computer Science Faculty in the Basque city of Donostia-San Sebastián, Tartalo is a 1.5 metre tall robot that wanders around the corridors of the building. It uses biomimetic systems the explore and learn about its surroundings.

What makes this robot so interesting is its politeness. If it finds a closed door it wants to enter then it “knocks” using its feet and waits for someone to let it in!

I wonder how it reacts if someone shouts “Go away, I’m in the shower”?