Leave it to the Slovs to come up with the perfect robotic companion for the homeless….nevermind that it only speaks Slovenian, any homeless guy with half a brain knows that you just put a cardboard sign on it that says…”Homeless Robot, Electricity is Expensive, Please Help!”
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Beggar: the robotic panhandling proxy – Engadget
We’re bombarded with so many robots each day that most don’t even warrant a second glance from us. Soldierbot? Seen it. Nursebot? Ditto. Shoppingbot? Yawn. So when we stumbled upon a wild project called “Beggar (a robot for the materially deprived),” we immediately knew that we’d struck gadget gold. Created by Slovenian designer Saso Sedlacek (there’s a bunch of funny accented characters above his name that we don’t know how to encode), Beggar is the perfect sidekick for the homeless-on-the-go, who need to multitask just like everyone else now that they’re being outfitted with pimped out multimedia shopping carts. In all seriousness, though, Sedlacek assembled Beggar out of junked computer parts to provide a cheap way for the “materially deprived” to retain their dignity while still earning a meager income. One proposed advantage of Beggar over analog panhandling is that it can be set up in places where the homeless are usually forbidden to loiter, such as shopping malls and chichi society events. Those readers catching our posts on those previously-mentioned shopping carts will be disappointed to learn that not only is Beggar still a prototype, its Slovenian pleas for loot would likely go unheeded in about 99.9% of the world.
