iblog

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas recently, Honda (yes, the car company) exhibited progress on a little idea they’ve been researching: helper robots, that they hope to one day be caretakers in everyday households. Their mechanical caretaker is called Asimo. He’s been around for a while, but not commercially, and never this impressive. It can walk - forwards and backwards - and even both run, and climb stairs. That’s 20 years of development and computational power equivalent to 5 of the world’s best PCs. They hope one day to sell the robot to one of the existing companies that manufacture and market such devices to home-owners.

These other companies are already selling robots to the military, making toys like the little velociraptors you see around, and producing robots that scuttle around your carpet hoovering it. It seems we humans are becoming more and more fascinated by having robots - both for entertainment as well as utility - perhaps because, in a robot what you have is the appearance of a real being that is completely at your disposal. Taking this “artificial person” metaphor even further, a recent government report - looking over prospects for the future - stated that if robots came into mainstream use, they might even be given rights.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Technology, Gadgets, Science, Amusement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.