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This is great news if there is water on Mars but i believe one of the major stumbling blocks on a manned mission to Mars and sustaining him isn't so much water
but getting people there alive.

Astronauts just on the journey (180 days each way + 550 days for return journey planetary alignment) would be exposed to lethal doses of radiation meaning when they got to Mars they would already be too ill and poisoned to be of any use to science let alone come home, i don't really feel that comfortable in sending (volunteers) to die a horrible slow death from radiation sickness under the guise of "research"

NASA have did do some research in 1998 on using dirt for shielding on any base but this doesnt answer the journey time radiation exposure problem

I think we forget in our own insignificance that the ISS and the shuttle fly close enough to the Earth's magnetic field and our atmostphere to be protected from the worst effects of our Sun (radiation,flares,magnetic bursts,uv, etc) but once we leave for Mars we will be exposed to the Suns full destructivness and we still havent developed protective materials/shields (short of 6ft thick lead) that will protect us long enough not to kill us in the 915 day exposure of such a mission.

I am still suprised that we think we can send people there after water when so far all we have sent is a glorified "remote control car" instead of an advanced humanoid type robots like this into space ,so maybe we could get a better idea of how we might perform if/when we get to the surface to mine this water.

A great many of the Japanese humanoid robots are powered by Linux. For example, the PINO microhumanoid from the ERATO Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project runs on RT Linux. I saw that one at IJCAI this year, very nice. Of course, the most famous of 'em all, Honda's P3, runs on Solaris. I hung out at the P3 facility at Honda in north Tokyo for a while while staying at Sony. They have a bunch of SPARC rackmounts stored in their backpacks, and run off a remote radio link controlled by UltraSparc stations sitting on a table a ways away.

I am constantly amazed how Slashdot can get its underwear bundled up in a wad over almost trivially insignificant, highly redundant facts.

• Asimo
• Asimo
• Asimo Movies
• Honda P3
• Honda P3 & Asimo

This was posted a while ago, but with a different site. Try this site: http://www.honda-p3.com/ for english text and movies and such.

Proof that Slashdot doesn't read Slashdot.

Here's the article: New Walking Robot From Honda.

And the English site is at http://www.honda-p3.com/engl ish /html/frameset2.html.

But I've been downloading trans-oceanic quicktimes for the past couple of hours (at 28.8) and I still think it's a hoax.

Depictions of robots in sci-fi movies have always had the problem that they skip over the 'intermediate forms' between obviously-not-human and much-too-realistically human-with-a-few-small-flaws. And as far as I can see Honda's materials commit the same sin-- where are the intermediate forms???

A real example of an intermediate form

If you see a demo that in every detail resembles a person crouched in a special suit... what does Occam's razor say you should conclude?

Why did they need to give it a humanoid torso and arms? Why do these also move exactly like the human versions? Why is the head concealed in a visor, if not to give their actor a way to look around? Why do the P3 quicktimes show only the cliched, anonymous box-with-blinking-lights inside, instead of showing off the real high-tech in the legs?

PROVE ME WRONG, PLEASE!

My page of robotics links if you're interested.

This is not Honda's first robot project - they have been working on them for almost two decades, and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D. Earlier versions include the P2 (1996), and the P3 (1997). As an idea of their progress, here are Honda's specifications for the P2 and P3.

They're impressive beasts, but one has to wonder why they've spent nearly a billion dollars on this. For improving mass production techniques? Possibly, but there are surely better ways. As transport of the future? Hardly.