iblog

People are more fascinated by the idea of humanoid robots than ever before. First there’s everyone’s favourite, Asimo, the walking, dancing brainchild of Honda. The ultimate goal of the Asimo project is to create something that humans can accept into their homes, like a maid.

But Asimo is a robot - he doesn’t think or feel. So next you have emotional robots. As reported by my iblog colleague Rushda, technology is being developed that allows robots to interact emotionally with humans, detecting happiness and sadness, anger and anxiety.

The latest addition to this saga is robots that learn like humans. Whilst AIs capable of learning have been around for decades, they have always done it in a very unnatural way. However, a new robot, Dexter, has begun to learn how to walk in the same way as a baby does: being stood up and encouraged to balance. In his first attempts, you can watch Dexter very tentatively moving his leg forwards and then retracting it, experiencing being imbalanced for the first time, and trying to work out what to do. It’s almost cute.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Technology, Gadgets, Lifestyle, Culture. 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.