Upcoming accessories will include a "gripper arm" that allows the robot to grasp and carry objects; in a popular demonstration of the arm, an ER1-outfitted laptop grabbed a beer from a refrigerator and brought it to the owner. The major advance of the ER1 over previous consumer robot products is that it can do sophisticated analysis of visual information, said Jennifer McNally, senior director of marketing for Pasadena, Calif.-based Evolution. Show a CD cover to the ER1's camera, and it can recognize the disc and cue it up from a networked music appliance. Wave a beer bottle in front of it, and it knows what to look for on its trip to the kitchen. Every day more consumer products become available that will make it easier for me to build my army of killer robots. Kit morphs laptops into robots | 
