Meet Lucy, The Orangutan Robot

Roland Piquepaille writes "Lucy is not an ordinary robot, driven by software. She's a pure product of artificial intelligence (AI). And after a three-year long training, she's now able to make a difference between an apple and a banana, which is quite handy for an orang-utan, even if she doesn't eat them. Her five microcontroller chips wouldn't like this... In "A Grand plan for brainy robots," BBC News Online tells us that Lucy is the brainchild of Steve Grand, an honorary research fellow at Cardiff University's School of Psychology. And why did he choose an orang-utan design? "I made Lucy as an orang-utan because, can you imagine how scary it would be if she looked like a human baby?," said Grand. More details and references are available in this overview which also includes the cover of Grand's last book, 'Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps,' which was already reviewed on Slashdot."

Comments

Lucy's home page

[morcheeba]

Lucy's home page is an even better place for technical details, including an anatomical overview and scrapbook pictures

The Japanese do it right

[macshune]

I don't know if this is a trend exhibited by the majority of Japanese android/robotics researchers, but from what I've seen they tend to follow a no-face design ethic that I'm most pleased with. I think it's safe to say that most people would find anthropomorphic robots that don't look 100% identical to people (there's something off with that one) very creepy.

And besides, these Japanese robots look way cooler and have this implied subservience about them, at least to me. It's a lot harder to humanize and attach (scary) emotion to something that's faceless and non-human looking, rather than something that looks like a hairy/scary-ass rendition of a planet of the apes extra.