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Robodex 2003 Shows Robots Ready for Work & Play
Roland Piquepaille writes "Robodex 2003 was held last week in Yokohama, Japan. At this show 38 companies, colleges and other organizations introduced more than 90 different types of robot. Many were designed to handle tasks too dangerous for humans and assist people in their daily lives. In this column, you'll find a selection of articles and short quotes about this trade show which attracted about 70,000 visitors. I also built my own Robodex 2003 Fashion Show (the whole page weighs 172KB). You'll find there pictures of many new robots, including Banryu, developed by Tmsuk, Inc., which will control your home while you're away, Doki, the world's first gender-aware robot, built by Intelligent Earth, from Scotland, or the Comet III, a one ton mine-clearance robot from Chiba University. There are also pictures of new machines from Sony, Mitsubishi or Fujitsu among others."
hey, man, don't look now, but that robot is checking out your package
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Perhaps it would be a bit dangerous (at present) to let a robot do an operation all by itself, but robots might provide a great help to human surgeons. There have allready been some successful tests with surgeons using robotic arms to perform a surgery. OK, that arm is still operated by a human, but it gives an idea of a possible man-machine interaction to perform complex tasks.
The same thing goes for cars. Although you wouldn't need a robot (in the sense of the conference) to drive a car. The car driving itself would be much easier. And when you look at how far developers are at letting airplanes fly themselves (fly-by-wire, autopilots, stabilizers), it might not be too long before a similar thing is done with cars (without making them unaffordable).