Walking. Grasping an object. Empathising. Some of the hardest problems in robotics involve trying to replicate things that humans do easily. The goal? Creating a general purpose robot (think C-3PO from Star Wars) rather than specialised industrial machines. Here are seven existing robots that point the way towards the humanoid robots of the future.
Photo: Getty
Atlas
Use: Originally built for Darpa Robotics Challenge
Made by: Boston Dynamics
What it tries to do: Achieve human-like balance and locomotion using deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence.
Features:
• 1.7m tall and weighs 82kg
• Can walk on two feet and get back up if it falls down
Human equivalent: Legs/skeleton/musculature
Superflex
Use: Military. Part of Darpa’s Warrior Web project
Made by: SRI Robotics
What it tries to do: A suit that makes the wearer stronger and helps prevent injury
Superflex is a type of ‘soft’ robot, which can mould itself to the environment or a human body in a way that typical robots can’t. The goal is to make machines that feel and behave more like biological than mechanical systems, and give additional powers to the wearer.
Features:
• Battery-powered compressive suit weighs seven pounds
• Faux ‘muscles’ can withstand 250lb of force
Human equivalent: Musculature
Photo: SRI International
Amazon Echo
Use: Voice-controlled speaker
Made by: Amazon
What it tries to do: Lets you control devices by talking to them
It may not have any moving parts, but Amazon’s Echo – and Alexa, the digital assistant that lives inside it, is definitely trying to solve one of the central problems in robotics: how to create robots that can recognise human speech and provide natural voice responses.
You can tell Alexa to:
• Control your light switches• Give you the latest sports scores
• Help tune your guitar
Human equivalent: Voice and ears
Life-like humanoids
Use: Natural interactions
Made by: Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories
What they try to do: Create a sense of ‘presence’, or sonzai-kan in Japanese, by making robots that look identical to humans
Human equivalent: Feelings and emotions
First image shows ‘Geminoid-F’, video shows ‘Erica’ (Erato Ishiguro Symbiotic Human-Robot Interaction Project)
Geminoid-F photo: Getty, video: Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories.
Pepper
Use: Day-to-day companion, and customer assistant
Made by: SoftBank
What it tries to do: Recognise and respond to human emotions
While Pepper clearly looks like a robot rather than a human, it uses its body movement and tone of voice to communicate in a way designed to feel natural and intuitive.
Human equivalent: Feelings and emotions
Photo: Getty
Robo Brain
Use: Knowledge base for robots
Made by: Cornell University
What it tries to do: Accumulate all robotics-related information into an interconnected knowledge base similar to the memory and knowledge you hold in your brain.
The human brain is such a complex organ that it would be extremely difficult to create an artificial replica that sits inside a robot. But what if robots’ ‘brains’ could exist, disembodied in the cloud? Robo Brain hopes to achieve just that.
Researchers hope to integrate 100,000 data sources into the database.
Challenges: Understanding and juggling different types of data
Google Car
Use: Self-driving car
Made by: Google
What it tries to do: Group learning and real-time co-ordination
The true ambition behind Google’s automotive efforts is not just to make a car that can drive itself. Instead, it’s to use group learning to strengthen artificial intelligence, so that if one Google car makes a mistake and has an accident, all Google cars will learn from it. This involves managing large-scale, real-time co-ordination.
What happens when robots rule the road
Photos: FT Graphic/Getty/Dreamstime