It’s said that about one third of the world’s city citizens live in substandard housing. But researchers say free plans now available online for building houses made of manufactured (大量生产) parts that perfectly fit together may help solve this problem.

The world population is expected to grow to about 8.5 billion by 2030, and the housing situation in urban centers is already a huge problem. Building new homes in the traditional ways still takes weeks or months.

In a London neighborhood, a group of volunteers are constructing a house made of pre-fabricated plywood panels (预制胶合板) and parts, the so-called WikiHouse. All parts were precisely (精确地) cut in a Computer Numerical Control, or CNC machine, following a free plan downloaded from the Internet.

Founder of the UK-based WikiHouse Foundation, architectural designer Alastair Parvin, said this could be the solution for affordable housing. He said, “WikiHouse is essentially a series of technologies we are developing aimed at massively simplifying the process of making re-ally sustainable and high-performance houses to a point where almost anyone can do it.”

Precise cutting allows a perfect fit for all parts, which speeds up the process of assembly (装配). No special tools are required. The WikiHouse was built in 10 days for exhibition purposes. Then, it was taken apart and reassembled elsewhere for permanent use.

“Open-source software is now really established, and it drives a lot of the software we use,” Parvin said. “What’s happening now is that it’s coming into the world of physical things, so we are effectively building a kind of Wikipedia for physical materials.”

Parvin says the project is in its early stages, with limited availability. But he says he believes it will grow as more people start showing interest in the houses whose assembly doesn’t require special skills.

Scientists from the Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems at the University of Tsukuba designed a text message mediation robot that can help users control their anger when receiving upsetting news. This device may help improve social interactions as we move towards a world with increasingly digital communications.

While a quick text message apology is a fast and easy way for friends to let us know they are going to be late for a planned meeting, it is often missing the human element that would accompany an explanation face-to-face, or even over the phone. It is likely to be more upsetting when we are not able to perceive the emotional weight behind our friends’ regret at making us wait.

Now, researchers at the University of Tsukuba have built a handheld robot called OMOY, which was equipped with a movable weight driven by mechanical components inside its body. By shifting the internal weight, the robot could express simulated emotions. The robot was used as a mediator for reading text messages. A text with unwelcome or frustrating news could be followed by a persuasion by OMOY. The robot tries to make the user not get upset, or even expresses sympathy for the user. “With the medium of written digital communication, the lack of social feedback redirects focus from the sender to the content of the message itself,” author Professor Fumihide Tanaka says.

The mediator robot was designed so that it can help suppress the user’s anger and other negative interpersonal motivations. The researchers tested 94 people with a message like “I’m sorry. I am late. The appointment slipped my mind. Can you wait another hour?” The team found that OMOY was able to reduce negative emotions. “The mediator robot can relay a frustrating message followed by giving its own opinion. When this speech is accompanied by the appropriate weight shifts, we saw that the user would sense the ‘intention’ of the robot to help them calm down,” Professor Tanaka says.

Are you troubled by housework, such as cleaning tables or tidying your room? Do you need a helping hand? Recently, the robot Mobile Aloha made by scientists at Stanford University in the US became popular online. In the videos posted, we can see the robot preparing dishes on its own. It’s also good at watering plants, petting cats, cleaning the floor and washing clothes.

Sounds good? Well, another video posted by researchers may disappoint some people. Mobile Aloha isn’t good at doing housework on its own. Instead, it learns from human actions before doing each kind of housework. When the situation changes, it can’t work well without a human “teaching” it. So it may break dishes, bump into (撞上) things and even burn a pot.

The robot can successfully move chairs 80 percent of the time, said the team after they did more research on it. For cooking dishes, it’s only 40 percent. In short, it’s far from perfect.

In fact, AI robots are good at tasks such as math and playing chess, but they face challenges when it comes to simpler actions like cleaning. And it’s the same for Mobile Aloha. For example, if its body doesn’t move correctly — even just with a small mistake, its arm may move too far to pick up a glass.