Now your phone can become a robot that does the boring work: What you do is what the robot does

This is because workers would be able to shift to taking on more varied and higher-level tasks, and factories could produce a greater variety of products. That's the idea behind a prototype smartphone app Purdue University researchers have developed that allows a user to easily program any robot to perform a mundane activity, such as picking up parts from one area and delivering them to another. The setup could also take care of household chores -- no more plants dying because you forgot to water them. Purdue researchers present their research on the embedded app, called VRa, on June 23 at DIS 2019 in San Diego. The platform is patented through the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization, with plans to make it available for commercial use.