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Two-Legged Home Robot, Coming Soon To Japan
An anonymous reader submits "Two Japanese companies, (ZMP corp., and Mizuno, a athletic goods manufacturer), announced that they will start selling the first two-legged robot for home use. The robot, called nuvo, will retail for 500,000 yen. It wil be able to understand 1,000 (Japanese) words, dance, and allow the owner to contact the robot via 3G phones."
The US already has this... The Robo Sapien ...Japan is sooo behind the US in technology...they need to catch up(sarcasm)...The robosapien is much better...well atleast it looks alot better...
A robot that moves using two legs is a bad move designwise. While we as humans need them (or rather needed them) for traversing different types of terrain, this bipedal robot can't even do that, making it having two legs pointless.
This is obviously a toy plain and simple, but you can't help wonder what kind of super maneveurable robot they could have created had they ploughed their efforts into something less pointless.
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
Except the robot is useless for that. No hands for medicine and the camera will not be sufficiently well-placed for monitoring. There will only be a single (low-res) viewpoint of the world from low to the ground. There will be too many false alarms from sleeping, watching TV or just out of the house!
Nope. The Japanese fixation with humanoid robots is not going to help caring for the elderly any time soon. We have no good way of dealing with flexible materials, no good vision-based object recognition for reasonable sets of objects and no way of doing truly dextrous manipulation (two arms at once!).
When someone produces a cheap robot with reasonable sensors and an open source development environment, we many be getting somewhere. Then, instead of reading Slashdot, you could be programming your own robot.
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
House robots need to do just a few useful things..
Get x
Put x
Get paper from curb
Get beer from fridge
Get book from shelf
Get remote from table
Get phone from cradle
Put item into the trash
Put toy in child's room
Turn on/off light
Dogs can be trained to do this stuff. Why not robots?
Of course, it has to be able to keep itself charged.
Robots will become even more useful and desirable when they can start doing particalar tasks:
Wash dishes
Take out trash
Scrub toilet
Change cat box
Vacuum floor
Do laundry
Don't talk to me about Roomba. I'm talking about a _generally_ smart humanoid robots that is capable of using other dumb machines to accomplish a task. I wish IBM would spend research dollars on this rather than research how to play a better game of chess. (Not that don't like chess!)
This allows for two things:
1) If the dumbs are designed to be used by a human, then the work can done interchangebly by human or robot. Robots will be ultimately replaceable.
Suppose you have a really competent roobmba, that keeps the floor nice and clean. So much so that you no longer have a vaccuum, becuase the roomba is the tool for the job. When the roomba breaks, you are sol.
If you have a dedicated (potentially non-humanoid) robot for each dedicated task, we beging to lose control of our environment and become dependant on the robots.
But an intelligent humanoid robot can step in right now and start using the tool already available to to any number of tasks.
If the robot breaks, humans can step and clean the bathroom with the same tools the robots has been using. Or, you will only need a single set of redundant intelligence in case of failure.
2) By keeping the intelligence (and the expense of intelligence) in a humanoid form, we gain a lot by allowing the peripheral tools to remain dumb -- and therefore cheap and "the same as it has always been."
The Robotic Age will not look much different than the age we are in now. All of the same stuff will be in place and work the same way. It's just that there will this additional robot that does some of the work.
As voice recognition becomes more tenable, it would be nice to put that complexity in one place for consumers. Instead of having the microwave, tv, a/c and lighting system each having their own voice recognition system -- ("TV, turn off." and "AC, set temperature to 74 degrees.") We can have a single system in a robot that can respond to our voice commands and operate all the existing dumb systems in our current households.
In my imagination, robots like what I'm envisioning above will be significant purchases for households, on the order of a vehicle purchase. They would be financed. You would have one or two per house. They would be insured.
Software Wars