So lifelike! Soon humans will be unecess...

April 5, 2003 9:26 AM

Gracefull bipeds, miniature robot ballets....Titled by the BBC as "Humanoid robots wow Japanese", The world's largest robot exhibit this weekend in Yokahama features Asimo by Honda ["Asimo can now recognise individual faces and can understand gestures as well as spoken commands. Meet him once and he never forgets, responding by approaching and calling your name on subsequent meetings."] as well as Sony's newest Aibo accesories and their stunning SDR-4X ll, a biped sporting "fluid walking motion and lifelike gestures." Epson Seiko caught my attention, though, with their dozen tiny Bluetooth controlled 12.5 gram Monsieur ll-P robot prototypes which executed a miniature choreographed ballet.

Pretty soon they'll be scuttling around on our walls like cockroaches, watching us......
posted by troutfishing (11 comments total)

Robodex.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 10:10 AM on April 5, 2003

I, for one, WELCOME our Bluetooth controlled biped robot overlords.
posted by Espoo2 at 10:30 AM on April 5, 2003

I LOVE ROBOTS. how long until I can put my brain in a robot body?
posted by mcsweetie at 12:09 PM on April 5, 2003

Heh.

"Humanoid robots, some of which can even walk on two legs, dominate the world!"

It's in the bbc..
posted by slipperywhenwet at 12:09 PM on April 5, 2003

> Pretty soon they'll be scuttling around on our walls like
> cockroaches, watching us......

The cockroaches may have something to say about that.
posted by jfuller at 12:38 PM on April 5, 2003

You mean they aren't watching us now?

Please speak into the plant, Mr. Ashcroft...
posted by TeamBilly at 1:02 PM on April 5, 2003

Sony's SDR-4X is an interesting development from AIBO. It's quite different in some ways--it has expensive accelerometers and precision joints that enable it to balance as fluidly as it does, as well as hardware that extracts depth information from its stereo camera system in real time. However, there are many similarities as well--the cameras, as I understand them, are identical to the ones in the AIBO, and I'm pretty sure the OS and machine architectures are quite similar (even though SDR has two computers inside instead of one).

A while ago a Sony scientist came here to (among other things) do a video demo of the SDR-4X (i.e. no robot, just movies). Several labs here wouldn't mind having one--there seems to be a budding community of folks interested in humanoids.

In any case, the similarities between AIBO and the SDR-4X makes our lab hopeful that we can port our software onto SDR should the opportunity arise.

Anyone who's really interested in this stuff and can be in Pittsburgh, PA from April 30th to May 4th should try to make it to the first RoboCup American Open. An ASIMO will be there, along with lots of soccer-playing AIBOs.

<gloat>Finally, I'm interning with Sony in Tokyo part of this summer to do AIBO development work. Can't wait!</gloat>
posted by tss at 4:06 PM on April 5, 2003

The humanoid robots are cute and all and must be fun for researchers, but it looks like Toshiba is trying for the practical home robot market. [sorry cant find a decent english link for the ApriAlpha]

From what I've read its a home info-bot that uses 802.11, speech recognition, and has a built in camera and LCD screen. I can imagine some useful applications from this kind of set-up like: rolling over to you and reading your email, verbally asking it google searches, 802.11 videoconferencing (Dad's face appears on the bot and tells the kids to quit screwing around), home appliance intergration, pulling a broom/vacuum, etc.
posted by skallas at 4:43 PM on April 5, 2003

Can anyone tell me why most Japanese websites are designed to be scrolled sideways?
posted by titboy at 4:48 PM on April 5, 2003

Pretty soon they'll be scuttling around on our walls like cockroaches, watching us......

Into the widening gyre...
posted by Opus Dark at 4:57 PM on April 5, 2003

Opus Dark - Holy crap.....a surveillance technology blog! Wow. I can't recall whether the cockroach spies were first mentioned by Stanislaw Lem or P.K. Dick........

Skallas - Close to "Jetson-ville", eh? No personal aircraft plying the sky in mass numbers, but the robots!...Aah, the robots.

tss - Good luck. Stay clear of those sex robots...they'll steal your soul and suck you dry. But put in a good word for us humans, eh? A few line of code to give us a running start when they start to round us up? (just kidding)
posted by troutfishing at 10:14 PM on April 5, 2003