Androids at China's Robot Expo 80
eldavojohn writes "China's 2006 Robot Expo has wrapped up. Even though there is little information on it online, there has been much attention given to Zou Renti's android. It seems that everyone cool is making androids of themselves these days. There's a decent article on the state of androids in Japan but unfortunately, the concentration isn't on functionality, it's on fooling the humans the robot interacts with: "The key to a successful android, according to Dr. Ishiguro, is both very humanlike appearance and behaviour. One of his early android creations was cast from his then four-year-old daughter. While it looked like her, it had few actuators and its dull facial expressions and jerky movements proved so uncanny that the girl later refused to go to her father's lab because her scary robot double was lurking there." The latest robot he's built has 42 actuators, allowing it to wow many spectators at the expo. I wonder how much longer it will be before we see Blade-Runner-like cases on the evening news?"
Oblig. etc. (Score:1)
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As a resistance fighter from the future.. (Score:2)
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Well.. Blade-Runner-like cases or RoboCop-alikes, I think the world is trying too much to mimic the Science-Ficion books.
Why too much"? For example, computer software as we know it (take windows, linux, office, autocad, matlab, catia whatever example) doesn't match at all the vision of the all-problems-solver computers in science fiction books.
I have a strong feeling that androids are also not supposed to be like us, as opposed to what SF belived.
Maybe the HUGE difference betwee
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If you take notice of what's happening in the east, they are trying to make their bots more and more humanlike. I think that's useful in a human interaction role, e.g. an automated cashier at a store or a personal all-purpose android. Of course it's not useful for very purpose-built robots, especially for the military where insect-like bots are much more useful than bipedal mechas or industrial robots wh
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fixed that for you
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No, wait, that would be if the reflection was in the guy's retina...
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Laws of robotics (Score:1)
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Of course, the laws of robotics will probably do more harm than good with more advanced robots anyway. I've heard Servotron . . . . . .
which part of "drone" didn't you understand? (Score:3, Informative)
An armed "drone" doesn't do anything without being commanded to. It has no independent decisionmaking capabilities. Hence the name drone.
The "laws" apply to AIs, not machines.
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That seems very hard because they are arbitrary/relative in every situation.
Regularly, you wouldn't pound on a guy's chest. But if they meant to save humans in trouble, they'd have to give the heimlich manuever to a choking man and CPR to a man pulled out of the pool and not breathing - both acts which can break ribs, etcetera - thus being acts they can't perform lightly.
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Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Hook up electronic senses (webcam mic and speaker) and he can be on the golfcourse and in the office at the same time.
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From TFA: "Robots are information media, especially humanoid robots. Their main role in our future is to interact naturally with people."
put in an "also" and replace "Their main role" with "One of their roles". Now you've got an almost certain truth.
A good story teller can out compete the tv anytime.
A robot is already better than a sign (but also (much) more expensive.)
A robot can lie as well as it can tell the truth, (most) humans can't.
P.S. What does a wife cost in China these days?
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Because this is Slashdot. While it might be fun to make android copies of Grace Park using Lego Mindstorms, those hard bricks, 90 degree angles and pointed corners make playing with her not fun. Not to mention the lube keeps shorting the damned thing out.
Or so people tell me.
Pete...
Skin realism (Score:1)
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Oh, please. You must be an impostor around here. Any true geek would tell you that it's the porn industry that's... err... behind it.
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Skin realism is, I should think, less important for making an android comfortable to interact with than personality realism. To take examples from science fiction, think about Mr Million in Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus [amazon.com] and Anson Guthrie in Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars [amazon.com] . Both are downloaded personalities of real people, and even though they are encased in ugly battleship gray, the other characters understandably react to them as real human beings because of their personalities.
Meanwhile, e
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That just doesn't work in so many ways
Bear in mind that sci-fi is generally written by one person, who is usually a geek, and who may have different ideas of what they're comfortable around than the rest of the population. A geek may be comfortable talking to a gunmetal-grey box, but your average
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Real skin? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hopefully, the only built them with six foot co (Score:1)
Is there any video... (Score:1)
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The key to a successful android... (Score:1)
Re:The key to a successful android... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Of course not...and why should they have by themselves? Neither will a computer function without an operating system.
I just think that a massive neural network would be a critical component of any artificially intelligent android. It would also, of course, require the correct topologies, proper algorithms, a more adequate understanding of the human brain (and then probably a model of that), massive computing power (quantum computer)?
What do you think?
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I think that with all that other stuff you mention (including stuff that we don't have, and don't know how to get, i.e. proper algorithms), it would be misleading to label "a massive neural network" as "the key".
The truth is, if we knew what "the key" was, we'd be a lot closer to creating AI than we currently are. As it is, we can hypothetize that it is proper algorithms, a massive neural network, or a lot of other things. In reality we haven't got a clue. In particular, labelling something we already hav
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OK, I know where people get this, and this sort of thing keeps flowing around, so maybe I can help, just this once.
IAAAIR. (I am an artificial intelligence researcher).
First: neural networks do not, in the general sense, run programs. They get trained to execute what basically amounts to mathematical functions. One function-crunch per cycle, roughly. (I'm vastly simplifying here, but the main point is that neural networks are not, as currently implemented, general-purpose computing devices).
The b
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How do we know that humans are intelligent? Couldn't we apply the same standards to determine if a candidate AI is intelligent? We don't entirely understand how the human brain works, yet we regard ourselves as intelligent.
A neural network is neither necessary nor sufficient for intelligence, but biological neural networks are the only functioning intelligent entities we know of. Seems
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After that, the next most easy is to genetically engineer some animal to have more intelligence.
Finally, after all of that, is to make it from scratch with wires and silicon and so on.
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Yes, when I ask my android where would I find the answer to 42... its response should be "The Internet! oh and porn! would you like to see another Hot Lezbo Teen flick?"
I'm looking to bake a cake? response "Fruit cakes are good, but why not buy one online... here is a nice one, Barry's Hot Fruit Cakes, it comes from Asylum Ridge... buy now?"
Forget these androids (Score:4, Interesting)
Regardless, these androids are carnival mannequins with better fake skin. They are also victims of the "Uncanny Valley [wikipedia.org]". At worst they look cheap, at best they're creepy. I got a picture taken with one [mcgill.ca]. The developers refer to it as a "lover robot" and it would move its mouth while piping a Celine Dion song through a speaker. They spent way too much time adding fake nipples and revealing clothing.
The product brochure by the "Beijing Yuanda Superman Robot Science A Company of Limited Liability [bjydcr.com]" states:
"The lover robots like the real beautiful woman and handsome guy are primarily for family collection and appreciation. This is a huge market, for instance, recently Japanese will spend about 27 billion yuan on person-like robots each year, and the global consumption on such commodity is about 500 billion yuan. Comparing with these unmovable puppets, the lover robots are more realistic, charming, intimate, lovely, sexy and attractive."
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I don't think you CAN spend too much time on nipples and revealing clothing.
And I'm not kidding - you want to make high-brow robots? Make and sell sexbots first.
Once you're a billionaire, you can make that chess partner and Jupiter Probe Pilot.
Science history will remember you for the AI work, but sexbots will pay for it.
Who wants to take bets on the first lawsuit over a celebrity replica sexbot?
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The link to the pictures of the robots seems to be wrong, or has it moved?
You don't say (Score:2)
That's the whole point of those robots. They are neither especially smart or revolutionary. They are very high tech puppies with latex skin, designed to explore our perceptions of what is real and what is not.
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Nice, this will spoon a bunch of replies laughing at me for taping the wrong world.
Look at Japanese humanoid work (Score:5, Interesting)
The important site to look at is Robots Dreams [robots-dreams.com], which covers Japanese robotics work. The little humanoid robots at the $1000 level are getting quite good mechanically. The best ones now have maybe 70% of the hardware functionality of Asimo at under 1% of the cost. They're typically remote controlled, but, because they have more degrees of freedom than a human can control with an R/C controller, preprogrammed movements were added. That wasn't good enough, so some hobbyists have added gyros and balance reflexes. Now it starts to get serious.
The hobbyists are doing some very good work. There are competitions and battles for these things. Obstacle courses which look like something from Army basic training. The battles aren't just banging away like Robot Wars; these machines can execute judo throws.
More to the point, the hobbyists are making progress much faster than the academic robotics people ever did. There are more of them, enough to drive a market for mass-produced parts. That makes it easier to build the things.
If you took the best kit humanoid available (which costs about $1200), added a 6DOF inertial unit (a few hundred dollars and getting cheaper every year), a stereo vision system (or even a SwissRanger [swissranger.ch] minature LIDAR), better force sensors in the feet and hands, and a WiFi link, you'd have ASIMO-level capability for a few thousand dollars. We'll probably see that within two years, and probably at a low price point.
Then it's all software. And there's lots of theory out there just waiting to be used. This is going to be fun.
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The work that you shoot down so smugly for the academics is the basis of what is going into the hobbyists.
Actually, I'm more from the academic side. The US academic world is great at theory but terrible at bending metal. In fields where you need a few technicians per engineer, US academia does not cope well. (Except, historically, in high-energy physics, which does have several technicians per engineer, and in the biological sciences, which inherit the tradition of several flunkies per doctor.) You do
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Oblig. question (Score:1, Troll)
(and can it run Linux? And imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!)
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Would these be... (Score:1)
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It's a pity I could not find this video fragment somewhere online, like on YouTube. It would have been so much better.
I believe the pinnacle of robotics will be... (Score:1)
Fracking toasters (Score:2)
-Eric