Smelling Robots Tell You if You Stink

We all know how a case of bad breath can be embarrassing for both yourself and the people around you. If you have dog breath, however, chances are not many of your colleagues, friends, even family, will tell you about it. Enter the pair of smelling robots recently unveiled by a group of inventive pranksters from the National Technology College in Kitakyushu, Japan.

One of these will detect if you have bad breath, while the other will tell you if your feet are stinking too.  The group of researchers, who call themselves CrazyLabo, came up with the idea of a woman’s decapitated mannequin head that evaluates your breath the minute you blow into her face.

Kaori-chan has an odor sensor hidden inside her head and she will definitely not spare any feeling when telling you if you could use a mint or more to freshen your breath. The robot breath assessor will give you a rating on a scale from one to four. One being the “you smell like citrus” assessment, while four is an insufferable “emergency alert” telling you it may be necessary to look for a doctor’s advice.

In not so many words, the foot smelling counterpart will tell you if your feet need more washing or the use of better cosmetic products. Shuntaro-kun is a smelling dog robot that will sniff your feet and eventually give you the verdict. If your feet smell OK, the dog will cuddle, if you are on the opposite end of the smelling scale, he will play dead.

The idea for these funny, yet useful robots came to the researchers’ group leader Kennosuke Tsutsumi while visiting areas in the Tohoku region that had been hit by the tsunami in March 2011. He wanted to develop a series of robot prototypes that were able to cheer people up. The project was done in collaboration with ten students from the National College of Technology who served as the first study group. These passionate students spent the better part of two days wearing the same pair of socks and eating foods with smelly ingredients, to test out the robots’ 4-point scale.

Both smell assessing robots are only prototypes for the moment, so they aren’t on sale. However, the creators were thinking of taking them on a tour of Japan.

[Image via Gizmag]