Kevin Ashton, now at RFID start-up ThingMagic talked to USA Today about ideas about RFID that are floating around businesses and universities, such as a pickup robot that might team up with RFID to help us living in a spick-and-span house:

Witihn 10 years, every item in the house, even your socks, will come with a RFID tag.

So we are in 2014, you have the RFID, now buy a robot with an RFID reader and pincer arms that can telescope to reach high shelves.

Once you’ve invited the robot at home, you clean the house, make sure everything is in its place and turn on your ‘bot and set it to “learn” mode. It would traverses your house, picking up RFID signals and learning where every item belongs.

Then you would be able to set the robot to “fetch” mode and see your electronic maid wandering the house, reading the RFID signal of each strewn item, and picking up the items and puts them away.

Another scenario is the impact of RFID on garbage. Garbage trucks could dump their loads on a conveyor belt that goes past an RFID reader, redirect them into appropriate recycling bins and do the sorting for you.

More in USA Today.

Talking about cleaning robots: Roomba Red robotic.