Volvo's ROAR robots will take all the heavy, smelly lifting out of trash collection

"Imagine a robot that quietly and discreetly enters your neighborhood." This is not the prelude to a new cautionary tale about the inevitable rise of the machines, but rather the opener to Volvo's press release announcing a new joint venture for the development of autonomous trash-collecting robots. These two-wheeled bots — who in their present conceptual stage look like cousins of Disney's Wall-E — will "collect your refuse bin and empty it into the refuse truck ... without waking the sleeping families and without heavy lifting for the refuse truck’s driver," says the Swedish company .... http://www.theverge.com