Hello
Posted on 10/18/2006 7:37:43 PM PDT by annie laurie
KEIHANNA, JAPAN — With little more than a train station and a few government buildings, the sleepy town of Keihanna is a far cry from the dazzling celluloid cityscapes of Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. But just as in those classics of science fiction, futuristic robots are coming to life here -- androids that are astonishingly realistic, and could challenge our ideas of what we consider human.
Hiroshi Ishiguro is at the forefront of designing machines that look just like us. The senior researcher at Keihanna's ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories drew headlines around the world last year when he unveiled a robot that, from a few feet away, could easily have been mistaken for a Japanese woman.
Equipped with off-board cameras, microphones and floor sensors, Repliee Q1Expo can detect human presence and interview people with a microphone, moving its upper body in a smooth, natural fashion. All of which makes perfect sense, since Repliee is an android copy of Ayako Fujii, a real newscaster.
Yet Dr. Ishiguro, a fan of Star Trek's android Data, wasn't content with his Pygmalion creation. Repliee was designed as a research tool for what he terms "android science" -- a mixture of robotics and cognitive science in which androids can be used to study human behaviour such as gaze-direction.
Last June, Dr. Ishiguro's assistants pulled back a curtain before a handful of journalists to reveal an android that looked exactly like him, down to his oversized glasses and penchant for black clothing. It was sitting casually in a chair, one foot bobbing away, its eyes blinking and shoulders fidgeting in utterly human fashion. It slowly looked around the room before introducing itself in very polite Japanese.
Dr. Ishiguro's robot twin is called Geminoid, and it's not just a jaw-dropping gimmick with lifelike twitches. "The idea is tele-interaction," its creator says. "If I access the android through the Internet, I do not need to go to ATR any more."
Geminoid is actually an extremely sophisticated puppet. Dr. Ishiguro can remote-control it Wizard of Oz-style using a motion-capture system that transmits his upper-body and lip movements to 46 air actuators.
Dr. Ishiguro hit upon the idea of creating an android double in part because he got tired of commuting to Keihanna from his home in Osaka, an hour's drive away. With his main teaching job at Osaka University, he thought he could deal with his students at ATR by having a robot proxy there.
He believes that this form of communication is better than teleconferencing because the android will be able to project his physical presence, not just his image and voice. Certainly, when I sat down beside Geminoid for a chat with Dr. Ishiguro, I felt compelled to look it in the eyes, and couldn't just stare off into space as I might when talking on the phone.
So could Geminoid be a prototype for rent-a-bots that would allow distant colleagues to be telepresent and embodied at conferences? The Japanese would probably welcome the innovation. Androids are at the cutting edge of the culture's love affair with robots. Instead of fearing humanoid machines as potential Terminators, the Japanese are eagerly anticipating peaceful co-existence with them.
This lack of robo-phobia was plain at last year's Aichi Expo, a futuristic tech show where millions of Japanese lined up to chat with and get directions from multilingual android receptionists called Actroids.
A recent Japanese film, Hinokio, took up the theme of people empathizing with and acting through androids. In it, a boy who has become a shut-in because of an injury and the loss of his mother sends a humanoid robot to school in his stead, remotely interacting with classmates. The machine helps him return to society.
Indeed, Japanese science fiction has long reflected a national passion for anthropomorphic machines that help humans rather than harm them. Conceived shortly after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Osamu Tezuka's iconic comic book and screen hero Astro Boy (or Mighty Atom) is powered by an atomic engine. His role is to fight for peace in the near future -- and serve as a bridge between people and the robots that serve them.
In contrast to Isaac Asimov's famous "three laws of robotics," which focus on robot obedience to humans, Mr. Tezuka envisioned a declaration of robot rights in which the machines are granted the same status and freedoms as people. "Atom affected many, many people," says Minoru Asada, a leading Japanese roboticist at Osaka University. "I read the cartoons and watched the TV program. I became curious to know what human beings are . . . and that's why I build robots."
It goes deeper. The traditional culture of Japan, birthplace of the Tamagotchi virtual pet, is hardwired with an ability to empathize with non-living entities. The native Shinto religion has a strong animistic tradition in which deities and spirits known as kami are believed to reside in everything from waterfalls to man-made objects such as swords and mirrors.
In Japanese Buddhism, the boundary between inanimate and animate things can also be absent. At Buddhist temples, thanksgiving and funeral ceremonies are regularly carried out for tools such as needles.
I have seen echoes of this in secular activities such as a little league baseball game, in which the kids lined up after the final inning and bowed to the field to express their thanks. It is also present in industry. In manufacturing plants, purification rites have been held for newly installed welding robots. Japanese owners of Sony's robot dog Aibo even bake birthday cakes for their battery-operated pets.
Roboticist Masahiro Mori, a devout Buddhist, sees the latest humanoids as spiritual beings. "Like all things, advanced androids will have a Buddha nature -- the potential for enlightenment," he says. "It exists everywhere, not just in robots that look like humans."
Not only do the Japanese have a cultural affinity for robots, they also have a social need for them: the country's birth rate is one of the world's lowest and a lack of immigrants means that the work force will start shrinking precipitously as the population ages. One solution being seriously pursued by the government is to develop advanced robots that can act as assistants to seniors. A consortium headed by the University of Tokyo, for instance, is planning for robots that can tidy up a room by 2008, make a bed by 2013 and lift elderly patients by 2016.
On the engineering side of this challenge, humanoid robots such as Honda's spectacular Asimo have demonstrated that bipedal machines can successfully navigate a human environment and perform certain tasks such as serving drinks. But then there's the design aspect -- what should these caregiver droids look like?
Dr. Mori has been considering this for decades, and a hypothesis about robot design that he put forth in the early 1970s has recently come to the fore. Known as the Uncanny Valley, it's a conceptual graph that compares our positive response to robots with their humanlikeness.
The more they appear human, the idea goes, the more we will empathize with them -- that is, until their flaws reach a zombie-like level where they become "uncanny," creeping us out and engendering a deeply negative response. An early example suggested by Dr. Mori was the shock one would receive when shaking someone's prosthetic hand while expecting it to be real.
Dr. Mori's Uncanny Valley graph was an entirely unscientific conjecture, but it has recently been acknowledged as an important design consideration for artificial entities by video game producers and roboticists alike. This is especially true in Japan, which has a much stronger focus on developing humanoid robots than in North America, where a more utilitarian, tool-like and military vision of robots predominates.
Android wizard Dr. Ishiguro is also looking for a scientific basis for mapping out and overcoming the uncanny valley. "Appearance is very important to have better interpersonal relationships with a robot," he says. "Robots are information media, especially humanoid robots. Their main role in our future is to interact naturally with people."
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 more advanced Repliee Q1Expo boasts 42 actuators, allowing it to move with balletic grace.
The kind of moves it makes is crucial too. In a simple experiment, Dr. Ishiguro had 20 subjects each sit in front of a curtain. They were told that the curtain would be pulled back for two seconds -- during which they were to identify the colour of a cloth hung there. Unknown to participants, Repliee was also sitting behind the curtain, either motionless or exhibiting pre-learned "micro movements" that people unconsciously make, such as shoulder movements when breathing.
When the android was static, 70 per cent of the subjects realized within the two seconds that they were looking at a robot. But when Repliee would turn its head or otherwise move slightly, 70 per cent of the subjects did not realize it was a machine.
Will androids ever be able to fool us completely with their imitative skills, like the "replicants" in Blade Runner, indistinguishable from the real thing? Maybe for a few seconds, Dr. Ishiguro says, but no more. The engineering and artificial-intelligence hurdles remain too great.
For now, they are far more interesting as imperfect mirrors of human beings, and as test beds for our ideas about ourselves. "A robot is a kind of simulator for expressing human functions," says Norihiro Hagita, director of the ATR lab that developed Geminoid.
Dr. Ishiguro, who is developing cognitive science experiments in which he will use the android in social interactions, puts it this way: "My question has always been, 'Why are we living, and what is human?' " His polyurethane and metal self may soon start providing the answers.
Ping
Self to robot self "mow the lawn" or even better "get me a beer".
How fast can "ME#2" type?
Cue Styx's Mr. Roboto lyrics
Hello
Audio animatronics...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1iK3iIY6kE
Bill and Ted's real "robot usses" got here a few years late.
They are still a very long way off. Even the most advanced robots are nowhere near human.
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I resent that, [JEDI MASTER PIKACHU], my intelligence is completely artificial.
Ah, Stepford!
Where women are women and men are happy. :)
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