

Toyota Humanoid Robot Runs At 7 Km/hr - Awesome Vid - kkleiner
http://singularityhub.com/2009/07/29/toyota-humanoid-robot-runs-at-7-kmhr/

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russell
I thought Toyota was pretty good until I followed the link in the article to
Big Dog. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww> Big Dog is truly
awesome. It runs, jumps, recovers from slips, climbs over rubble, ...

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peregrine
Amazing what an Industrial Military Complex can do with half the US Budget.
I'd like to see them put some money into space myself but robots are good too.

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jerf
Arguably, putting money into robots _is_ putting money into space. Along with
a lot of other things, too. Robots have already long since passed through the
hype cycle and now we're firmly sitting at the end of the cycle in "ho-hum",
but it's worth taking a moment to realize just what this all means, and that
the old sci-fi predictions may not have happened on schedule but are about to
start popping up.

While everyone's busy moaning about the economy and how terrible everything
is, I've been looking down the road five or ten years and I see amazing things
coming at us, _fast_.

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gnaritas
OK, I'll bite, what's a few of the most amazing things we'll see in the next
five years?

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jerf
I don't see a lot of household robotics in that time frame, but I think we're
going to see a new generation of industrial robots. Some of them have already
started to pop up, and robots like this story will continue that trend.

Right now, robots only work in spaces explicitly designed for them, which has
really limited their effectiveness. They're going to be able to move beyond
that into more human spaces, which has two major advantages: A lot of human
spaces exist, and those spaces are set up to do more different things, which
robots will be able to participate in. An assembly line is a fine thing, but
not terribly flexible. (Though increasingly, this is a fuzzy line, and the
line will get fuzzier; indeed, this is one of the effects I am anticipating.)

Computer vision seems to have taken a new step forward lately, and while
they're still miles away from "full human vision" (which is AI-strong,
ultimately), they're moving from total toy problems into really useful
problems.

Brain interaction is also moving forward lately.

Now, you might say I'm not being specific. Well, here's why. In the five-to-
ten year timescale, what I see is that where today these things are still the
cutting edge of research, in the five-to-ten year timeframe this is going to
be available to small startups and dedicated hobbyists. I don't know _exactly_
what will be made of advanced computer vision and smart robots and direct
brain interaction and another five-to-ten years of hardware development and
two guys in a garage (oh, and we'll still have the internet, of course, and
pervasive cellular connections), but I find it quite likely that it'll be very
significant... in exactly the same way the Internet is significant. It may
take a genius to push the frontier of computer vision or robotics, but thanks
to the miracle of programming, it won't take geniuses to apply them in new
ways.

Also, I could probably go on for another three or four times longer, but this
_is_ an HN comment, not an essay. (Though maybe I should make it a blog post.)

You wake up today and it's much the same as yesterday, but you know, look back
at what the Internet has done to so many industries in the past ten years, and
what it has yet to do, and I think you start to get a reference frame for what
we may be looking at with the convergence of some of this stuff. I know I'm
not giving you product names and the bullet-point feature lists, but that
would be almost exactly like me trying to predict Facebook back in 1990. Even
those who were on the right track in the broad sense were wrong in many
ways... but they were right that big things were coming.

Big things are coming.

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modeless
Here's a specific technology that's going to be a huge boon to robotics in the
next 5-10 years: Flash LIDAR cameras. This is the technology behind the XBox
360's "Project Natal", but it's a lot more than a game controller. A Flash
LIDAR camera directly senses the distance to every object seen by the camera
by measuring the time-of-flight of a reflected laser pulse. With accurate
distance data for every pixel a lot of really hard computer vision problems
suddenly become much, much eaiser.

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joshhart
What's the current state of development on Dexter compared to this?
<http://anybots.com/abouttherobots.html>

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Keyframe
Creepy/Uncanny looking. While it is doing the dishes by day, it will come to
you at night, while you are asleep, and MURDER you!

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biohacker42
I am not interested in a roomba because I don't see it getting in around and
behind the toilet, the place I most hate to clean. Sweeping the wide open
floors is easy enough to not even be worth $50.

But something like the above, that has:

Enough hand eye coordination to catch a rolling ball.

Enough facial recognition to sort of be able to tell people apart, like a
human who's bad with faces.

Enough speech parsing to understand simple command even if you have to repeat
them a few times.

Enough knowledge, I'm thinking something like Wolfram Alpha here, to able to
be instructed to perform simple tasks.

Then it could do simple tasks like clean behind the toilet or work the
fryolator at McDonald's. And if it's mass manufactured and cheap enough to
build and cheap enough to buy, then we could see something interesting.

The slow uptake of humanoid robots into the everyday workforce. How long
before we have robot janitors?

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harry
I love my roomba!

It single-handedly licked my kitty-litter tracking problem. it keeps my place
completely swept on a weekly basis (I've a small studio loft, nothing huge) -
preventing me from stepping on the odd tiny rock that was drug in by my
workboots. It devours dust/hair bunnies which come with long hair and a cat. I
never swept so the 120$ woot price on the roomba has changed my place from
gritty to well kept.

Altho damn, now I wish it scrubbed the floor behind the toilet.

Back to the meat there - I think that the next advance in robotics is going to
be alongside artificial limbs and human assistance devices. AI introduction
into society seems to receive such strong philosophical opposition that I
doubt we'll see much in the next 10 years.

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jerf
The high-speed footage was most interesting to me. In terms of the "uncanny
valley" and my personal reaction to the robot's movement, I find that it's
still not human to me... but I think it's starting to crawl up the side
towards human-looking. In terms of the traditional graphic
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mori_Uncanny_Valley.svg> ), I think this
thing is somewhere between the prosthetic hand and the bunraku puppet, on the
higher end of that range.

YMMV.

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fauigerzigerk
I wonder why they don't build humanoid robots more like monkeys. The reason
for robots to be humanoid is to enable them to move in spaces made for humans,
right? Monkeys can do that too, only better, because they have much longer
arms and can use their arms to help with walking without falling as well as
reach higher up without being taller.

Sometimes I get the feeling that making robots as similar as possible to
humans is a goal in itself, and that, I think, is not a useful dogma.

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Tichy
Hm, if monkeys are better suited for human environments than humans, why don't
we look like monkeys? There must be some advantage to human proportions?

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fauigerzigerk
Which one? You're implying that all things are best the way they are because
everything trends toward perfection. Having tried quite a lot of office
furniture recently I can report that humans have not figured out what's best
for human proportions :)

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vlod
Make the 3 laws mandatory now!

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jerf
Every single three laws story is a story about how bad an idea the three laws
are. I am always amazed and amused at how many people miss this.

And Asimov was right. Alas, it will not be that easy.

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gurtwo
The Asimov stories illustrate exploits on his own 3 laws. But how can you fix
that? Embedding a full robotic-oriented legal system in their little brains
does not seem to be the answer neither. I think we have to admit that robots
will be far from perfect. They will make mistakes. They will stumble and fall.
They mill misjudge situations. Like we humans do.

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philwelch
Interesting that it runs on the balls of its feet rather than using the heel-
first running that running shoes tend to promote. Is the barefoot ball-first
gait easier to implement?

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LogicHoleFlaw
The ball-first movement is much more natural for humans too! Running shoes
promote rather un-biomechanically sound forms of locomotion. I think in 100
years modern shoes will be considered with the sense of horror footbinding is
regarded today.

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neilc
100 years might be an overstatement:
<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/barefoot/>

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lutorm
That looks good, but with that gait it's clearly going to have problems with
uneven surfaces. It needs to lift its feet more.

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rawr
You guys are totally missing the best part!

The robot is named "Asimo".

[Eric Cartman voice] "You can trust Awesom-o. In fact, you should tell
Awesom-o all your most personal secrets. Awesom-o will not make fun of you or
tell your secrets to other people and stuff."

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Avshalom
No, Honda's robot is named Asimo, and it's been named that for many years now.

