Humanoid Robots

On Star Trek; Next Generation, Data was a humanoid robot, right? Actually, no, he’s an android, a robot built to look human. Humanoid robots resemble humans, and sometimes, only part of a human, like from the waist up. C3PO is a humanoid robot.

Building humanoid robots is a circle of learning. In order to build a walking robot, for instance, scientists had to figure out – in broad terms – how humans do it. Once a robot could do it, they studied its movements, learning more about how humans do it, and how to improve the robot’s performance. This has led to better prosthetics for humans, including powered leg prosthetics, ankle orthosis, and biological realistic prosthetics.

Theoretically, humanoid robots can be programed to perform many jobs that humans do, using the same tools humans use. Realistically, at this point, they are more specialized. Some are entertainers, others might be assistants for the sick and elderly. Wikipedia had photos of some of these specialty robots:

Topio is a Vietnamese ping pong playing robot that is 6’2” and 264 pounds.

Nao (pronounced Now) is French, and originally played soccer, but moved on to universities to assist with education and research. As of 2015, some 5,000 units of Nao were in over 50 countries. One Nao can dance, another performs stand-up comedy. The University of Tokyo bought 30, intending to train them to be lab assistants. (I don’t know how well that did or did not go.) At some point, the company was sold and Nao became Japanese. They have been used to help teach autistic children, train ISS crews, and assist the elderly. The most interesting item I found was that in a philosophical experiment, Nao robots were shown to have a basic sense of self-awareness. It is just shy of 2 feet tall, and weighs less than 10 pounds.

Enon, from Japan, was designed to be a personal assistant, and has no legs, but rolls along, so the bottom half looks something like a long skirt. It is self-guided, has limited speech identification (and production), and can carry approximately 1 pound in its arms. I found no information on its size, but the photo I saw indicated it was approximately half as tall as the man next to it.

The robots are coming! The robots are- Well, they’re already here. But they aren’t anywhere near as sophisticated as Data. If you buy one that plays soccer, but then want it to dust the living room, you’d probably have to completely reprogram it, maybe change out the arms, beef up the servo motors, and install more sensors.

Oh, never mind. It’s easier to do the dusting myself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanoid_robot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPIO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nao_(robot)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enon_(robot)

If it Walks Like a Duck...

I’ve been reading magazines like Archeology and Popular Science, trying to learn The State of Science So Far. Many of the articles in these magazines are fascinating and could serve as a spring board for stories.

One article was about a group who were designing robot legs that could walk like a human. The legs don’t exactly look human; there’s a couple kevlar straps (used as muscles) in the back that - when contracted - are outside the thigh, connected to the calf by a plastic flange. But the results move much more like a human leg than other robots have managed.

I was very excited a few years back to hear about Asimo, a child-sized humanoid robot that could walk. But I was disappointed when I actually saw it in motion. Slow motion, that is. Asimo would lean to the right a bit, pick its left foot up straight for about an inch, move the left foot forward a couple inches and put it down, repeat for the other side. And at all times, the foot remained parallel to the floor. It was a strange gait, rather painful to watch.

Besides a different system of ‘muscles’, the new method of robot walking also makes use of something like a human’s subconscious. A human learns to walk, and then leaves the actual giving of instructions to a corner of the mind. We don’t have to actively think, ‘Lean, lift by bending, swing foot forward, lower, adjust balance...’ The people making this new robot gait removed such calculations from the robot main processor and gave this skill to a separate processor.

This particular robot only has legs and feet right now, but I am beginning to anticipate a real android - a robot made to look (and act?) like a human. Data of STNG, the androids in the Alien movies would be examples, although I swear I remember old tv comedies about robots paired with a human to see how well they ‘blended in’. Could that happen soon in a neighborhood near you?

I was also amused to read in this article that one problem the team had to solve was that the hard plastic of the feet’s soles could not grip the floor. They debated about other materials to use for the soles until somebody put a pair of Keds on the robot.

If it walks like a human, it deserves the right footwear, don’t you think?