• A Human Touch

A Human Touch?

From: Christian Science Monitor - 02/05/2004 - page 17

By: Lori Valigra

Robots are expected to become more human in appearance and behavior in the next 10 years or so, and move out of the laboratory and into consumer households once a "killer app" has been found. Commercially available robots are primarily confined to the industrial sector, but sales of personal service robots are expected to increase nearly fourfold in the next several years. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe estimates that 2.1 million service robots will be shipped between 2003 and 2006, and will become more and more commonplace. With advancements, such robots could function as companions for the elderly, personal office assistants, or housekeepers.

Companies and institutions that are laying the groundwork for such milestones include Sony, whose humanoid QRIO robot sings, dances, and runs 15 yards a second; Honda, whose ASIMO robot can turn corners and climb stairs; MIT, which is working on Cardea, a mechanized personal assistant that can open doors and move around on a Segway Human Transporter; and the University of Tokyo, which is developing a multi-layered artificial skin for robots with 1,000 organic, pressure-sensitive transistors. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology is engaged in a nine-year project to develop robotic caretakers and assistants for the elderly or disabled, a surgical robot system, and other machines with yearly $1 million grants from the Korean Science and Engineering Foundation. The general trend is to make robots more humanoid so the people they interact with have a greater emotional investment, but MIT grad student Aaron Edsinger notes that making robots too human-like could be off-putting.

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Humanoids on the March

From: Economist - 03/10/2005 - Vol. 374, No. 8417, P. 3

Japan's industrial behemoths are racing to see which of them will produce the most sophisticated humanoid robots in a competition spurred by corporate rivalry, rapid technological advancements, a hunger for publicity, and the potential for tapping a vast new market. Breakthrough humanoid machines from Japan include Honda's Asimo, a walking robot whose speed, agility, and friendliness is being continually tweaked; Sony's QRIO, which walks, navigates by itself, recovers from falls, understands a limited series of spoken commands, and can link wirelessly to the Internet as well as broadcast the visual input received by its cameras; and Toyota's Partner robots, one of which is equipped with artificial lungs, lips, and fingers so it can play a trumpet. Non-humanoid robots currently outnumber humanoid machines in both the industrial and domestic markets, and roboticists such as Carnegie Mellon University's Takeo Kanade say this makes sense from a practical point of view. "The human body itself is not necessarily the best design for a robot, contrary to most people's convictions that evolution has made us the perfect machine," notes Kanade. Beyond publicity, creating humanoid robots allows manufacturers to demonstrate their technological expertise, and reap rewards from supplementary advances that happen en route. One of the long-term prospects for humanoid robots is their role in assisted living situations, especially as the baby-boomer generation enters retirement age. Honda's Jeffrey Smith says, "We human beings have engineered our environment to accommodate our physiology. So a very efficient share for operating in that world is a humanoid one." Smith says such robots will be in homes once the price drops to that of a car, while Sony's Hideki Komiyama expects them eventually to be as common as cell phones.

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Links:

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