Kacy Maala

BSIT 1-2
Summary of Discovery Robosapiens
In japan scientists are competing to recreate the human race in metal, plastic and silicon.
There’s a robot called Asimo. It is the first humanoid to walk out of the laboratory. It was
designed to look friendly. Every step of Asimo takes has to be pre-planned and its batteries only
last for an hour and it’s taken nearly 20 years to get this machine up and walking. Masato Hirose
was the project chief engineer in making Asimo. During 1986, the robot can’t even walk in a
straight line and it needed 20 seconds to make a single step. Engineers spent years in monitoring
human body movements and programming their robots to recreate them. It took four years to get
the speed up to a km an hour. It took another two years to get the robot to cope with slopes and
stairs.In 1993, there’s a progress and finally attached the legs to something that looked like a
body. P1 was almost 2 meters tall and weighed 180 kg. Its successor P2 was much lighter and
more compact. According to James Kuffner from Robotics Institution, Carnegie Mellon
University, the robot was able to walk without wires, everything was self-contained, onboard
batteries and onboard computers, and he said that Honda hide the robots for 10 years. Another
robot was introduced, called h7. The objective of creating h7 is the capability of performing
complicated tasks like playing football. James Kuffner developed much of h7 software. H7 can
track a ball with its eyes and make its own decisions about how to follow catch or kick it but
there are limits of what it can do. A whole new set of software is needed just to get h7 pick up a
bat. H7 doesn’t find the bat by using its camera eyes instead every movement is planned in
advance and written into its software. James Kuffner said that the software that he wrote for h7
took over five years to develop and over a hundred thousand lines of code excluding recognition
of speech, recognition of other kinds of sensing like computer vision functions. In Japan,
mechanical servants have a bright future and not just in the home which is why Japanese
government is funding the development of industrial robots. HRP1 is a remote-controlled robot.
In the future versions of the robot could replace human workers on construction sites. HRP2 is
designed to help people with heavy manual work. It is remotely-controlled by instructions given
through a headset. Morph 2 is a miniature humanoid, like human it can sense when it’s off-
balance but it’s not always successful at compensating. Morph 3 is made possible by 26 joints
that result to its incredible flexibility. It is all coordinated by 133 sensors and gyroscopes which
detect changes in pressure and position. While humanoids are being developed other robots were
already put to work.
PackBot is a robot designed to help the police and Armed Forces in dangerous
operations. The robot is designed to climb stairway, climb into the building to look around
essentially put eyes and ears inside the building. It gives idea where the doors are, where the
stairway is, where the bad guys are and if it’s still alive, and if there are good guys. PackBot can
be controlled from almost a km away. It is a versatile robot equipped with cameras,
microphones, infrared sensors and sonar. The satellite navigation system tells its operator where
it is as well as the role and pitch of the terrain. PackBot is housed in an impact resistant
aluminum shell that can survive a 3 meter drop onto concrete at extreme temperatures it can
move at speeds of almost 20 km/h and through 3 meters of water. If lands upside down its
flippers turn it over. One reason it’s so tough it has no wires that might break or become
disconnected. PackBot works alone but there are situations will be an advantage to have a whole
team. This is becoming possible new technology called swarm. A group of little robots works
cooperatively. The inspiration of their software is the behavior of ants and bees. Swarm bots can
talk to each other without human control. Follow my leader makes communication easy
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BSIT 1-2
especially underground where radio links don’t work. The swarm can pass messages through
each other until they reach the surface. Teamwork can spread out at speed covering a wide area
quickly. The robots can create an up-to-the-minute moving map of the disaster area. Ultimately,
the goal is to construct thousands of swarm robots clever enough to take on intricate tasks in
difficult environments such as searching for landmines, rummaging through rubble in the
aftermath of an earthquake or even exploring forbidden planets like Mars. Space Research will
have job opportunities for bigger robots.
Robonaut is a remote controlled robot developed by NASA to work outside a space
station where there’s danger from space debris and cosmic rays. Safe inside the space station the
astronaut wears a special visor and glove. This robot mimics the astronaut’s action. Another
robot introduced is Papper O which stands for pardon a personal robot. It’s a pc on wheels it
could act as your personal secretary. It can take voice messages send and receive email and even
operate the TV. It recognizes 650 voice commands and speaks 3000 phrases. It recognizes
people by their faces and recalls facts about them like their blood types and birth dates. When it
listens, it ears turns green. In 1997, the world’s greatest chess player Garry Kasparov was beaten
by a computer called deep blue. Cog is a robot that like a baby is learning through experience.
Cog has cameras through them it can see objects in wide- angle or close-up. It can track objects,
sense and depict color. At first, Cog didn’t know where its arms stopped and where an external
object began but by seeing and poking the toys, Cog is slowly learning the map of its own arm
and how to distinguish a particular object from the background. If robots can learn from
experience it won’t have to be programmed for every task but this initiative is still labor
intensive.
K1 is another robot shown, it tries to copy its programmers work out. The designer of K1
Yasuo Kuniyoshi sees a future where robots will grow up and learn alongside humans. A robot
would learn its human partners like and dislikes and adapts its behavior accordingly but that’s a
long way off for K1. Darrin Bentivegna teaches DB to play hockey. DB’s camera eyes have been
set up to track the pucks bright color. So far so good as long as the lighting conditions don’t
change. But to play the game DB not only needs to see the puck but to predict where it will be a
few seconds later. Once DB has learned how to keep an eye on the puck, it the needs reasoning
skills to decide its strategy. Having chosen it shot DB need the motor skills to execute it and all
these seeing reasoning and action skills need to happen instantly. Through verbal communication
DB can be teach new skills just like teaching a person. If robots can learn and repeat tasks just by
watching they could become invaluable in the workplace. Other developers are taking the
concept of a human robot one step further. They hope to produce a robot that not only copies
movements but also human’s emotions and facial expressions.
Fumio Hara directs the faced robot program at Tokyo’s Science University. Silicon is
stretched over the skull made up of semiconductors, wires and pistons. The wires have to be
positioned in exactly the right place to replicate the muscles in human face. Hara believes that a
great deal of communication is through facial expression alone. To communicate effectively with
humans, robots will need to express feelings humans can understand. With the help of tiny video
cameras mounted behind the eyeballs the robot can already read human faces and copy what it
sees. It’s programmed to recognize and recreate six emotions. But Hara wants to give the face a
voice so the robot can not only look angry but sound angry. WE4 also known as Mr. Personality,
it doesn’t want to be ignored and it shows surprise when the scientist opens a bottle of vodka but
Kacy Maala
BSIT 1-2
it does like the smell. WE4 can make expressions of disgust, fear, anger, surprise, sadness, and
happiness. Once a robot can express these reactions spontaneously, it will be well on the way to
having a personality.
Rodney Brooks is developing a sociable robot he calls Kismet. Kismet engages with
people through an expressive face-to-face interaction. Brooks was inspired by infant social
development and psychology. Kismet has a bunch of different emotions and it will react
differently the same stimulus depending on what emotional state it’s in. Kismet was designed to
react to social cues and learn from a human instructor. Fifteen computers are involved in making
kismet either bored lonely, stimulated, tired, talkative or silent. It’s still only a rudimentary
personality but robots are slowly becoming more and more like humans. Robots are already in
the workplace and they may soon be in our homes.
Eric Harper has one part robotics, he lost his right arm in a printing press accident. Eric
was eventually rescued but most of his right arm had to be amputated. The robotics in Eric’s new
arm are deigned to respond naturally to his body movements. The arm consists of
microprocessors circuit board motors and gears. It weighs nearly three kilos. Electrodes in the
socket receive electrical impulses from what’s left of Eric’s muscles. A valve seals the vacuum
inside his false arm helping to keep it in place. A computer reads the electrical impulses from
Eric’s back muscles and bends his robotic elbow raising his forearm. Eric can make his hand
close by flexing his biceps and open by flexing his triceps. One day this technology will be able
to improve our brains as well as our bodies.
There’s a stroke victim who can’t move or speak but an electronic brain implant gives
him the ability to operate a computer by the power of thought alone. His thoughts generate
electrical activity in the implant which is picked up by an aerial link to the computer. The signals
are then translated into action and the cursor moves on the screen. A two-way signaling system is
being developed so that implants can also receive information from other parts of the body.
External brain stimulation is already being put to the test. There’s the world’s first radio-
controlled rat. Three electrical probes each the thickness of a single hair were implanted in the
part of the rat’s brain picks up signals from its whiskers. The operator can direct the rat by typing
commands into the computer. When the signals are turned off the rat becomes confused until the
next signal is given. Rats can be invaluable for search and rescue amongst wreckage or for
sniffing out hidden landmines unlike clunky machines, rats are familiar with rough terrain and
small spaces. The concepts has not been well-received by animal rights groups such experiments
will be regulated and may be limited if they’re shown to cause unnecessary harm or stress to the
rats and mice but day human might choose to have brain implants themselves.
There will be robotic devices throughout human environment. Millions of chips will be
embedded in the furniture utensils and clothing. Michio Kaku said that instead of having a robot
doctor, the robot doctor could very well be in clothing, for example with chips in it. The clothing
will monitor a person’s health, heartbeat, monitor bodily fluids and in case of an accident, the
clothing will alert the authorities and download the entire medical history before the ambulance
arrives. The rise of the machines could be just around the corner and this may be a source of
hope not fear because the robots running our lives are unlikely to be the metal and silicon
creations of science fiction. The combination of a person and robotic technologies can be far
better than any pure robot can build.