Tech startup Bumblebee Spaces is freeing up floorspace in small apartments with robotic furniture that drops from the ceiling and is controlled by an AI "butler".
Bumblebee Spaces has designed a range of modular furniture and storage that can descend from and retract into the ceiling to change a room's function, or create more floorspace.

An artificial intelligence system scans each possession as it is placed in a storage unit, tracking each item's location and anticipating the user's needs.
"You can retrieve your things without searching for it. There's zero cognitive load, in fact it becomes an assistant, a butler for the resident," Bumblebee Spaces co-founder Sankarshan Murthy told Dezeen.
"It knows where you've stored all your stuff and if you're on the way out your car keys, your shoes, whatever you need comes down. If it's going to be raining your umbrella comes down."
Murthy, an engineer who has worked at Apple and Tesla, developed the concept in response to the high rents on even the smallest apartments in San Francisco's Bay Area.
"When I moved here I was overwhelmed by how much we were paying for so little space," said Murthy.
"I come from a product background so I understood a lot about how we could densely pack objects really well. In the iPhone or Apple Watch we do such a good job of finding every micrometer of space to package all the features in so the user only sees the screen."

Murthy applied this logi...