No one likes cleaning up after themselves, which is why it's great to be living in a time in which robots are being created for the express purpose of tidying up. It's the golden age of robots, when they're advanced enough to be useful but not yet so advanced that they get mad about doing our dirty work and try to kill us.

This cleaning robot from Japan can scoot around on its own, cleaning up, and features WiFi and a video camera to keep it connected to home base. It can even apologize when it detects that it's bumped into a person. Yes, that's good; train the robots young to fear and revere their human masters. We've got to watch our backs, after all. — Adam Frucci

Tech.co.uk, via Digital World Tokyo