Only last year, Honda Motor’s now-familiar humanoid robot, Asimo, was learning how to run and avoid tripping over obstacles. Now, the 5-year-old droid is ready to take on simple office work, greeting visitors and fetching refreshments.
Honda’s Robot Ready for Office Chores
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I think robotics like this will be the saviour of Japan’s economy. They look set to bring about a new indutrial revolution not too far into the future.
How I envy our kids – and all of the wonderful things that they will see…
GJ
I think robotics like this will be the saviour of Japan’s economy. They look set to bring about a new industrial revolution not too far into the future.
How I envy our kids – and all of the wonderful things that they will see…
GJ
I’m dying to watch the videos but they don’t seem to work for me. I’m running Flash 7.0.61.0 with Ubuntu 5.10 and cannot see anything with Epiphany or Firefox. Have any other Linux users been able to watch these?
“I’m dying to watch the videos but they don’t seem to work for me. I’m running Flash 7.0.61.0 with Ubuntu 5.10 and cannot see anything with Epiphany or Firefox. Have any other Linux users been able to watch these?”
As am I, and I’m running Windows of all things. Stream cache play pause repeat. Even when I wait until it’s gone all the way through and push play to watch it again, that vicious cyle repeats.
As cool as that thing is, you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches by not attempting to watch the videos hosted on that site. They don’t do it right.
For Quicktime and Windows Media video, click here:
http://asimo.honda.com/inside_asimo_movies.asp
The older videos do work. Go towards the bottom. The top ones don’t seem to work. I tried in Linux and MacOSX
Yeah this is seriously cool. It’s amazing to see the lifelike movements. I think I saw this thing doing a dance number a few years ago.
Droid, get me sammich!
It won’t be long before wheelchair users will want these kind of legs. This is hope for true freedom of movement and way more effective than waiting for every bit of public building to be made step free.
The walking technology alone is priceless. It will also surely give new directions to military research no doubt.
Until your chair’s battery dies mid flight… Tiiiiiimmmmbbbbeeerrrr…
While Asimo is cool, it has less than 2 hours of battery life, which is pretty low to be anything more useful than a “show off” for big companies when they have important clients coming in for meetings.
Renting Asimo from Honda for ads, movies etc. it’s $60,000 per day I think.
Quote
How I envy our kids – and all of the wonderful things that they will see…
/Quote
These robots will leave your kids unemployed.
Hi, I’m from Italy, but I don’t think in the rest of the world the situation is much different:
Actually many manual works are done by clandestine or semi-clandestine workers that can be forced by companies to accept works at unreasonable salaries and with unreasonable safety and health parameters.
They are able to accept those works and to live with those salaries because of incentives and tax reduction payed with taxes of other citizens.
In other worlds, tax-paying citizens are largely deprivated of benefits in paying taxes because taxes are needed as incentives to semi-clandestine workers that are needed by companies to keep salaries low and to cut safety and health costs.
Smart, eh?
Otherwise, that works are outsorced to third world… trying to sell the produced goods at *10 prices to first worls uneployied people that lost their job because of this outsourcing (that will not buy) and costraining outsourcing companies to pay billions of dollars each year (by the way, always from the taxes payed by the citizens they graciously left unemployed) to finance repression of arising concurrence from those countries, protect intellectual properties they exported and so on.
So, I tell you a little secret, capisciammè, the works that robots can do in near future were stealed from first world working class about 30 years ago, and still missing…
Luddite much?
Change happens. People made the same complaints about robots on auto assembly lines. Some jobs were lost, other, better jobs were created (designing, servicing the robots etc).
Detroit may have lost a lot of jobs overall, but the US isn’t exactly wallowing in unemployment. Other things come up.
It comes down to this: work should be done by those who can do it the most efficiently. That leaves the rest free to do other things. That robot will hardly make a good lawyer (ugh), artist, accountant, whatever.
*********** edit
Oh, anyone know what’s up with the Qrio? http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/ Other than a somehat unfortunate name, how does it compare nowadays?
Edited 2005-12-14 05:57
“Oh, anyone know what’s up with the Qrio? http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/ Other than a somehat unfortunate name, how does it compare nowadays?”
/rant mode on
I’m sure it (or he? or she?) can do much more complex task than Asimo! Being QRIO from Sony, I think it will be perfectly capable of switching on our PCs and install the Sony Rootkit!
😉
/rant mode off
I’m waiting for the day when a robot can clean the house for me — Rosie.
I give it ten years before these things can replace 95% of the jobs people do at Wal-Mart. Greeting shoppers, running the cash register, security, stocking shelves, helping customers find things, getting carts, etc. It will be shortly after that that they become cheap enough for large corporations to actually implement.
They’ll love these things. Massive workforces that need no health insurance, no days off, have no outside commitments, don’t complain, never sue anyone, and have no rights of any kind…and don’t even want any!
I wonder what the people who currently only have the skill level necessary for service-type Wal-Mart jobs will find themselves doing when robots displace them in droves?
20 years, but in the end, yes you are completely right. But the robots are already all around us. Large Internet shops are almost completely robotic.