Chores are one of life's necessities, but while your grungy floors indeed need cleaning, you don't have to be the one to do the dirty work. Today, Amazon is selling Anker's Eufy G30 Edge robot vacuum for $199, a massive discount from its usual $340. When we reviewed (and loved) the G30, it cost $370, and even then we called it "within the affordable range for a quality robot vacuum"--so getting that same robovac for just $199 today is a downright steal. "The Eufy G30 Edge is an easy-to-use mapping robot vacuum that cleans thoroughly and efficiently," we said, praising the vacuum's excellent navigation and compatibility with Alexa Google Assistant. Navigating Eufy's app is a breeze, and the dead-simple setup only takes a minute or two.

For more than 40 years, SWIFT has collaborated with its network to identify industry-wide challenges and develop solutions for the benefit of the entire global financial system. Tom Zschach, Swift's chief innovation officer, speaks to Finextra Research about how innovation remains central to the co-operative's new strategy, and how state-of-the-art technologies will help it deliver on its vision. Swift's strategy boldly asserts that it will retool cross-border infrastructure to fundamentally transform payments and securities processing, enabling the world's financial institutions to deliver instant and frictionless end-to-end transactions. Zschach explains that not only is innovation tied to Swift's future success, "it is in fact the key enabler for us to be able to implement our new strategy." A decade from today, Zschach argues that the financial services industry will be intimately entwined with every person's life and it is this ecosystem that Swift must prepare for.

Earlier this year, Diligent Robotics introduced a mobile manipulator called Poli, designed to take over non-care related, boring logistical tasks from overworked healthcare professionals who really should be doing better things with their time. Specifically, Diligent wants to automate things like bringing supplies from a central storage area to patient rooms, which sounds like it should be easy, but is actually very difficult. Autonomous mobile manipulation in semi-structured environments is hard at the best of times, and things get even harder in places like hospitals that are full of busy humans rushing around trying to save the lives of other humans. Over the past few months, Diligent has been busy iterating on the design of their robot, and they've made enough changes that it's no longer called Poli. It's a completely new robot, called Moxi.

To experience the state-of-the-art in autonomous mobile manipulation, you'll want to find some well-funded academic lab to visit. Or maybe check out Google, or Amazon, or Toyota Research, or drop in on the RoboCup@Home competition. Really, the only other place you're likely to find an autonomous mobile manipulator is in a relatively structured environment in a factory or warehouse, and even that is pretty rare. Mobile manipulation is super hard, especially when you try to do it in a less structured environment which may be full of all sorts of horribly unpredictable things (like humans). Diligent Robotics, a startup founded by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, is undaunted by the challenge of autonomous mobile manipulation in semi-structured environments.