Robotics researchers have Watch-Bot to tell you if a task needs attention

Our Watch-Bot watches what a human is currently doing, and uses our unsupervised learning model to detect the human's forgotten actions. Once a forgotten action detected (put-milk-backto-fridge in the example), it points out the related object (milk in the example) by the laser spot in the current scene. Andrew Dalton in Engadget called it "a sort of robo-sentry." Watch-Bot is designed to keep an eye on tasks in the home or office and remind you if one of those tasks is still not done--not with a beep, not with a soothing companion-like voice, but with a laser pointer to nab the object still needing attention. Evan Ackerman in IEEE Spectrum said Watch-Bot can independently learn your household activity patterns in order to come up with its unfinished task reminders. Core components of Watch-Bot are a 3D sensor (a Kinect, in this case), a camera that can pan and tilt, a laptop, and laser pointer, said IEEE Spectrum.