Sony Claims First Running Humanoid Robot

News for nerds writes "Sony Corporation announced the new development of Sony's humanoid robot, enabling integrated motion control for walking, jumping and running on feet. By applying this technology Sony has created the world's first running humanoid robot 'QRIO'. Japanese PC watch has an article with pictures and movies of QRIO running at 14 meters per minute, sometimes with both feet leaving the floor (= running)."

Comments

boring...

[Anonymous Coward]

wake me up when they create a robot that can breakdance! now that would be cool...

Calling Bill Joy

[ObviousGuy]

As we make these machines bigger and better and more like ourselves, shouldn't we also consider the possibility that they will at some point have to be assigned rights just as animals and even humans have rights?

There was a film with Robin Williams in it wherein a robot in fact reached sentience and it wasn't until after the robot's death that it was granted personhood and all the rights and privileges thereby.

Should we consider these creations of ours, no matter how sophisticated and intelligent nothing more than machines?

Re:Calling Bill Joy

[Clinoti]

Lets not go overboard here, women in some countries still do not have the right to vote or have basic human rights.

The uproar from giving those same rights to animate/inanimate objects before humans opens the door to so many arguments it's not even funny.

Of course the preceeding statement is contradicted by the fact that seemingly every conglomerate seems to have rights....

Re:Calling Bill Joy

[ColdGrits]

Actually, may I correct your correction? It wasn't an Isaac Asimov book, it was an Isaac Asimov short story :-) (A book of the same name was published, which was a collection of short stories by Asimov).

And the short story was miles better than the film...

Re:Calling Bill Joy

[jridley]

Sure, when we start getting towards sentience. Anything that is self-aware and capable of higher level communications should be granted some level of rights. The rights of a sentient creature should not be based on whether they think with water and carbon, or silicon, or whether they have testicles or a certain skin color.

But this is just a clever toy. It's no more aware of itself than Eliza is. They aren't even TRYING to go for AI, just fun toys.

The first AI (if/when) will probably NOT be in a robot; it'll be too large to be mobile, perhaps it'll even be a distributed supercomputer. Nevertheless, it also should be granted rights. Even if that day ever comes, it'll still probably be a long time, if ever, that the machinery necessary would be small enough to put inside a humanoid robot. I could see a humanoid robot being under the control of a machine intelligence via remote link, if the link is clever enough, it might even feel the body as it's "self."

Re:Calling Bill Joy

[Tim C]

Lets not go overboard here, women in some countries still do not have the right to vote or have basic human rights.

If we are ever able to create a truly self-aware machine, the fact that humans in other countries are denied basic rights would be no reason at all to deny that intelligence those same rights.

After all, those countries have their reasons (though we, of course, consider them to be wrong); are you seriously saying that we should do the same, just because we have our reasons too? How would denying our creations rights improve the situation for those humans? If anything, it would strengthen the countries' positions, giving them something to point at - "Look, you've created an intelligence and are doing to it what you accuse us of doing. How can you possibly expect us to not do something that you're doing yourselves?"

Get with the times, Sony

[.c]

Wake me up when their humanoid robot looks like a little blond boy. I mean, who'd adopt a white boxy monster named QRIO (Queerio?)

Re:Get with the times, Sony

[The Fun Guy]

Michael, we've all just about had it with you and your thing for little blond boys. With all of your plastic surgery, YOU are the one who looks like a robot.

Let's just hope

[CompWerks]

It doesn't run for Governor of Kalifornia!

Babelfish translation..

[rale, the]

here
- rale

The robot's first words...

[Channard]

...were reportedly.. 'Do you have stairs in your house?' Be afraid. Be very afraid.

It RUNS but

[Guiri]

does it run Linux?

Prosthetics for amputees

[AndrewCox]

I was just watching some news program (60 Minutes, 20/20 or the like) about recent Iraqi war veterans that have lost limbs in combat. Since their medical expenses are covered by the government, they were being fitted with the best prosthetics available (containing micro-processors that make adjustments based on the user's movements).

What surprised me was that although the legs did seem to work fairly well for walking, there's still a lot of room for improvement (climbing stairs was very difficult and running was out of the question). Advancements in robotics like this could be a great step forward for prosthetic limbs.

How soon before robotic limbs become so efficient that people are voluntarily amputating their legs for the better robotic counterparts?

Does Flash Gordon know?

[Channard]

you know the drill people.

Not personally - are they friends of the Mole People and the Mud People?

Re:Not Bill Joy...

[CommandNotFound]

...I think you mean Call Isaac Asimov, who wrote _The Bicentennial Man_ upon which that movie was based. Asimov probably inspired a lot of roboticists and tackled a lot of these human/robot ethical delimas in his fiction, including the controversial Three Laws of Robotics, which I'll repeat here for completeness (if you don't know these, you should go to the library and read some Asimov. _I, Robot_, is a good start; it's a collection of his short stories about robots.

Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

old news

[savuporo]

Check out http://plyojump.com and its accompanying blog for very good summaries on Japanese humanoid robot developments. ( the site seems to be down at the moment, but google cache helps )
QRIO was presented already back in august, at Robodex2003. QRIO is a direct followup, "production release" for previous development codenamed SDR-4XII.

There were other bots presented at Robodex, that were able to perform jumps and even somersaults.

The most interesting two IMO, are not megacorps entertainment bots ASIMO, AIBO etc, but humanoids that are of practical use or very low-budget, like HRP-II that is able to drive a backhoe, remotely assisted

And other one, SILF developed by a single person ( student ? ) on obviosly quite a low budget. Still, the bot is able to perform jumps.

Re:Distance

[gl4ss]

yes you did.

you can walk pretty fast too, i'd imagine a robot being able to 'walk' incredibly fast were it developed so.

you missed the part that roughly said "both legs leaving the floor".

for really ridiculous on-the-line judging go see some competition walkers(that can walk really fucking fast and get disqualified if they're detected running too much) sport events.

Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With!

[cuiousyellow]

But does it have real People Personality?

If so it will give weight to my theory that Sony consists of a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Re:Distance

[cyberlync]

This robot is also about a foot tall. If we scale the robot up it would be something like 84 meters per minute. Of course, thats assuming scaling works and it can be scaled. Also I havn't taken into account any other factors. Someone who actually knows about bio(robo?)mechanics may actually want to chime in here.

"Hello, Sony Tech Support, Robot Division"

[da3dAlus]

"Did I hear correctly? Are your newest robots running?"
"Yes sir they are."
"Then you better go catch them!"

pa-dum-cha! [boooo! hissss!]

This is really a great breakthrough!

[Gethsemane]

My masters thesis is in robotics and most individuals do not comprehend how hard it is to make a bi-pedal robot walk unsupported. When you examine the biomechanics of a simple taks of walking, you quickly realize just how impressive of a feat it really is! (You parents out there know what I am talking about.) Baiscally to walk you have to fall forward and catch yourself with a leg that swings infront of you. Essentially you are in an equilibrium of falling forward and balancing yourself with your feet. Of course this is an over simplified approach and doesn't consider how your toes or balls of your foot assist. Bravo to Sony! And hopefully Honda and Sony get into a race and do some real development with each of their respective robots.

Fuel Cells

[G4from128k]

This is where fuel cells will really come in handy. All jokes aside, a robot that can down a jug of methanol (and dump its waste water) and be refuelled in 30 seconds would be vastly superior to a robot that must be tethered for an hour or more to recharge its batteries. The superior energy density and speed of "recharging" make fuel cells the way to go.

Because legs are all terrain

[XNuke]

Try getting a wheeled vehicle to go everyplace you can go. Upstairs, climb a ladder, move in any direction from a dead stop. Wheel are great if you want to go fast, but legs are better if you want moderate speed and maneuverability.

Ask someone in a wheel chair what they think of wheels instead of legs.

Re:movies

[jest3r]

If you look really close you can see Kenny Baker's face behind the translucent visor.

Re:Admit defeat

[AKnightCowboy]

why can't you just do the nice thing and say "Good Job guys keep it up!" instead of "crap we better get our arses in gear before the japs send their robots to control us"

Because humans are all about competition. Don't even pretend that's not the truth. Everywhere from schools to offices to sports to global politics... everyone competes with everyone else. It's human nature.

QRIO Home Page

[jpatokal]

The obvious missing link:

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/

And in English too!

Re:Admit defeat

[musikit]

Wrong, humans are about survival.

correct we must survive the onslaught of japanese robots attacking the US.

can't we just invade them saying these robots are WMD? (danger will robinson sarcasm detected)

Significant? Only partly...

[heironymouscoward]

Building a two-legged robot that can stand and move upright is significant because it opens the door to a host of devices such as robotised prosthetics for handicapped people, exoskeletons, and so on.

But please don't take the humanoid shape seriously. It is no more meaningful than a piece of wood carved into a humanoid puppet.

Japanese technology often makes objects that are cute and play to our anrthopomorphic instincts, but two-legs/two-arms/head do not make a human any more than the aibo is a real dog.

So enough of the "robot rights" and "robot soldier" comments, these are just embarassing. Asimov wrote fiction, and humanoid robots with human rights are like nuclear-powered flying cars, they say a lot about the hopes and fears of the time, but nothing at all about the realities of the future.

As has been commented, a majority of real humans do not have basic human rights, and probably never will. Robots are machines however cute they look. Get over it.

Robot soldiers? Of course, but why on earth in such a useless configuration? The robotic armies of the future will fly, roll, crawl, dig, swim. They will not look like people: given how good we are at detecting differences between people, even imagining humanoid robots built to infiltrate and deceive is pure fantasy.

What's left? First, a wonderful gadget, a toy. I'd like some of these at my parties, fembots with all the right curves, dancing on the stage. Secondly, some very innovative and useful technology for building new kinds of motive systems, especially for assisting people who don't have the full use of their own legs.

Press Release Text

[cloudless.net]

World's First Running Humanoid Robot

Tokyo Japan, December 18th, 2003 - Sony Corporation today announced the development of dramatically enhanced motion of Sony's humanoid robot, enabling integrated motion control for walking, jumping and running. By applying this technology to QRIO, which is one of Sony's technology platforms, Sony has successfully created the world's first* running humanoid robot.
(* As of Dec. 18th, 2003, based on Sony's investigation, as an autonomous robot with internalized control system and power supply system)

In order to achieve stable motion control for conventional humanoid robots, either one or both feet needed to be touching the floor and, from the opposing force produced by the contact with either of the feet, motion such as walking was controlled. This is the control theory based on the so called ZMP (Zero Moment Point) stable range and forms the foundation of robot motion control.

The new 'walking, jumping, running movement control' technology which Sony has developed this time accomplishes motion involving both feet losing contact with the floor at the same time, which means it is a motion control technology enabling stable running and jumping. The seamless addition of motion control based on this new technology enabling running and jumping, has lead to the development of a robot having outstanding motion capabilities.

Furthermore, together with this new control technology, in addition to powering-up and enhancing the output torque of Sony's original and unique robot actuator, ISA (Intelligent Servo Actuator), a new hardware unit suitable for the running feature has been developed. By implementing this newly developed ISA in QRIO and optimizing the new control system, Sony has successfully created the world's first running feature for a humanoid robot.

Sony will continue to utilize the QRIO platform for various technological advances, leading to outstanding entertainment robots highly suited to the co-existence with humans and to the development of various technologies which can be applied to other Sony products. In addition, QRIO is Sony Group's Corporate Ambassador ;in fulfilling this role, QRIO will take advantage of various opportunities around the world to communicate Sony's vision of a world of dreams, entertainment and curiosity as well as introducing the technology that makes this vision a reality.

QRIO's Homepage : http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/

Re:Run Forrest!

[kermit6306]

"When QRIO determines that its actions will not prevent a fall, it instinctively sticks out its arms, swivels its hips, and assumes an impact position. At the same time, the control system instantaneously commands the servos in the joint actuators to relax slightly. In this way it lessens the shock of the fall, enabling it to survive unscathed. QRIO is also programmed to check its position after a fall, turn itself face up, and recover from a variety of prone positions."

I found that on Sony's website.

Reason to destroy all

[Matrix_X]

So, the first thing Sony does when it creates walking robots is put them in a chorus line. If that's not a reason for the robots to take over earth and destroy everyone, I dont know what is.

Uh oh!

[nsxdavid]

Has anyone read between the lines of the QRIO's feature list? This reads like a good er... bad Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton story...

These robots are designed to interact with you and ask you questions, learning and remembering the things you say and they observe. They are also wirelessly linked to the Internet.

Doesn't take much of a leap fo faith to see them all reporting into the SONY master mainframe. Watching, learning, snooping. Gathering data, intel...

Oh sure, this could be the minor conspiracy: They are doing this to market to us better. "Hmm, boy I'd like a new laptop but I only have $1000 to spend." Robot overhears, reports in... suddenly you get an offer in email (or by the robot itself) for, guess what, a laptop that only cost's $1,200 (hell anyone can come up with antoher two K eh?).

Or maybe, it's going to be the lead element of an invasion force. Japan might still be sore at us for the whole losing WWII and us nuking them (twice) and all.

Someone in the land of the rising sun, somewhere, thought, "We'll lie low, developing our technology and build robots. Oh not to kill... not at first. Just to be their friends. Yes, FRIENDLY robots. Robotos that will be a 'partner', that talks to them, plays with them, encourages them.... yes. And it'll watch and learn and remember. And report. And as they get comfortable, they'll upgrade thir robots to our next version. Soon they won't think about it; no more than buying a better DVD player (which we'll invent too). And then, one night, in their sleep... they'll never know what hit them."

FEAR QRIO!