This tiny robot cat will blow on your coffee to cool it off – TechCrunch
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Yukai Engineering’s parade of weird animal robots at CES 2025 continues with Nékojita FuFu. The little cat mounts to the side of a mug or bowl, blowing air to help cool it off. The Tokyo-based firm says the robot combines a fan and “special algorithm” — or a “Fu-ing System” — to blow at random strengths and intervals, like a person.The unique name is a combination of two distinct concepts. “FuFu” is an onomatopoeia for the sound we make when blowing on food. “Neko-jita” means “cat tongue.” This, in turn is a reference to people who have a low tolerance for hot food — a condition that apparently affects nearly half of the Japanese population, according to a survey.Nékojita FuFu is a product of the same internal hack-a-thon that gave the world Murami, the fuzzy little purse goblin that Yukai also unveiled at CES this week.“Nékojita FuFu was born out of Yukai Engineering’s 2024 internal Make-a-Thon,” the company notes, “during which a team leader reminisced about how badly he wanted help years ago with blowing on freshly cooked baby food for his son because doing so often left him feeling breathless and dizzy.”Yukai describes the robot’s mods thusly:The robot is set for release in Japan at some point in mid-2025, priced at ~$25.CES 2025, the annual consumer tech conference held in Las Vegas, is upon us — and this is where you…Topics
Hardware Editor
Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Juniper. Nvidia releases its own brand of world models
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Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/this-tiny-robot-cat-will-blow-on-your-coffee-to-cool-it-off/
