RoboCat to help the old
BOFFINS are developing a robot cat that can keep a person company, does not need a litter box and can remind an ageing owner to take their medicine or help them find their spectacles.
Toymaker Hasbro and scientists at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA, have received a three-year, million-dollar (£750,000) grant from the National Science Foundation to find ways to add artificial intelligence to Hasbro’s
robotic cat. The robocat, which has been on the market for two years, is aimed at the elderly and is meant to act as a companion.
It purrs and meows, and even appears to lick its paw and roll over to ask for a belly rub.
The Brown-Hasbro project is aimed at developing additional capabilities for the cat to help older adults with simple tasks. A TORY MP’s chief of staff accused of raping a woman told a court the pair joked around as they had sex in his boss’s Westminster office.
Samuel Armstrong, 24, said he felt like he’d been punched in the stomach after he was arrested on October 14 and thought that police had got the wrong man.
He is accused of abusing his position to attack a young parliamentary worker when she fell asleep after a night drinking in the Houses of Parliament.
Mr Armstrong, an aide for South Thanet MP Craig Mackinlay, denies two counts of rape, one of sexual assault and one of assault by penetration, claiming they had consensual sex.
Giving evidence at Southwark Crown Court, Mr Armstrong told how the pair ended up alone in BOOZER: House of Commons Bar Mr Mackinlay’s office in the early hours of the morning.
He said the complainant asked him to play jazz music and sat with him on a sofa, before jumping up and demanding: “Dance with me!”
He said that they danced in the office and began kissing, before he performed oral sex on her as she sat on the sofa.
“She made all the appropriate noises,” he told the court.
Mr Armstrong said the couple then had sex in the missionary position for several minutes, but the complainant got up to change the music when a
“And she says, very, very well’.”
Defence barrister Sarah Forshaw QC asked: “Were you being serious both of you during the course of this conversation?”
He replied: “We were joshing around and being funny. “I was being a bit of a prat.” Mr Armstrong, from Danbury in Essex, was arrested after the woman was captured on CCTV running through the corridors of Westminster in tears.
Describing how he felt when he ‘the size suits