Your new robot servant doesn’t have to look anything like a person or walk on two legs. In fact, it might just be a claw that hangs from the ceiling instead. That’s the future envisioned by Nathaniel Nifong, founder of Neufangled Robotics, and its Stringman robot . Put simply, Stringman is an AI-equipped claw suspended from four strings running through the corners of a room (up to 10 meters diagonally). Two motorized anchors adjust the lengths of the strings to move the claw around the room, from ceilings up to 4 meters high down to the floor to pick stuff up. With a payload capacity of around 2 kg, depending on its position, Stringman can move items to designated locations – like a toy box – and perform tidying tasks. Stringman can also be manually controlled if you’d prefer to play a room-sized crane game by yourself. According to Stringman’s documentation site, the device is currently a public prototype that “can self-calibrate in a new room and run policies, but is not yet reliable enough to be called a home appliance.” That said, demonstration videos on the website show it in action, and it’s neat to watch. Stringman is shown picking up laundry and dropping it in a basket, putting Lego bricks and other kids’ toys back where they belong, and generally zooming around rooms and demonstrating its agility. One could imagine a properly trained Stringman could even grab the remote you left on the other side of the living room and drop it in your waiting hand if you’re that incredibly lazy. “Our mission is to give people an organized home,” Neufangled says on its future roadmap page . “We prioritize robots that are narrowly effective at something that helps today rather than a general purpose robot that may be in development for years.” The company further describes its goal as designing robots that are low cost and capable of doing things that people hate to do – e. g…