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Androids at China's Robot Expo
eldavojohn writes "China's 2006 Robot Expo has wrapped up. Even though there is little information on it online, there has been much attention given to Zou Renti's android. It seems that everyone cool is making androids of themselves these days. There's a decent article on the state of androids in Japan but unfortunately, the concentration isn't on functionality, it's on fooling the humans the robot interacts with: "The key to a successful android, according to Dr. Ishiguro, is both very humanlike appearance and behaviour. One of his early android creations was cast from his then four-year-old daughter. While it looked like her, it had few actuators and its dull facial expressions and jerky movements proved so uncanny that the girl later refused to go to her father's lab because her scary robot double was lurking there." The latest robot he's built has 42 actuators, allowing it to wow many spectators at the expo. I wonder how much longer it will be before we see Blade-Runner-like cases on the evening news?"
Anyone else wondering what use this will be to "copy" people, when we can hardly even make robot walk let alone more these days?
I like muppets.
the skin looks better and better. That aspect of realism is the most striking, I wonder if this is driven by the prosthetics industry?
Oh, please. You must be an impostor around here. Any true geek would tell you that it's the porn industry that's... err... behind it.
Skin realism is, I should think, less important for making an android comfortable to interact with than personality realism. To take examples from science fiction, think about Mr Million in Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Anson Guthrie in Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars . Both are downloaded personalities of real people, and even though they are encased in ugly battleship gray, the other characters understandably react to them as real human beings because of their personalities.
Meanwhile, even if you had the most realistic-looking android ever, its limited intelligence and tendency to misunderstand would make dealing with it an annoyance. It would be like dealing with an infant.
If robotics wants realism, it's really dependent on progress in AI, not matter how much materials science makes authentic-looking skin.
I have a strong feeling that androids are also not supposed to be like us, as opposed to what SF belived.
If you take notice of what's happening in the east, they are trying to make their bots more and more humanlike. I think that's useful in a human interaction role, e.g. an automated cashier at a store or a personal all-purpose android. Of course it's not useful for very purpose-built robots, especially for the military where insect-like bots are much more useful than bipedal mechas or industrial robots which have a pretty much optimal shape already. But most people would probably prefer a bot that looks like a sexy woman over a more useful hexapod bot running around in their home (never mind that the hexapod would never be useful for a certain purpose...). Aesthetics and marketing are important for selling these things, people will buy an iPod over something that offers more functionality at a lower price because the iPod looks more appealing and is made by a brand they know.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.