LAS VEGAS — Looks like it’s time for WowWee to graduate from making robotic toys to making full-fledged consumer robotics. The maker of Robosapien and Roboraptor dipped its toe in the water last year with the release of Robopanda, its first remote-control-less robot. However, with its 2008 lineup, the company is setting its sights on becoming a home-robotics leader.
The company reports that its US product lineup will feature some 15 products, and three new ones are worth noting.
Two years ago at CES 2006, WowWee demonstrated its new two-wheeled P.E.A. (Personality Evolved Robot), the first product of a partnership between WowWee and Segway. Just like Dean Kamen’s Segway human transporter, the roughly 1-foot-tall black and white robot balanced on two wheels. It had two long arms and a screen for a face. Two years later, P.E.A. has returned as “Mr. Personality.” Gone is the two-wheeled balancing act. Instead, this red and silver home-entertainment robot gets around on three wheels set at roughly right angles to each other. What remains is the color LCD face and the robot’s sense of humor.
Without strong public interest, Legislature could hold upper hand on project’s location
MONTGOMERY – If Alabama’s rumored tight finances let Gov. Bob Riley move forward with his dream robotics campus in 2008, an economist says a campus closest to Huntsville makes financial sense.
But political experts say you can’t leave the Legislature out of the equation if the project needs state funding. Decisions about the future of the robotics campus could lie with politics for that reason.
Calhoun Community College and Wallace State Community College in Hanceville are contenders for the first phase of the robotics project. Riley had promised site selection by December, but his press spokesman, Jeff Emerson, said the governor will make no decision until after Jan. 1.
Phase one includes student-training facilities to prepare people for high-paying jobs working with and maintaining robots in industry. Later phases would include robotics research and demonstration areas where industries could show their robotic toys to potential customers.
With both colleges vying for the robotic plum, the experts say the final decision may hinge on one of several factors. Those factors include public opinion, proximity to high-tech research facilities in Huntsville, the governor’s plans after he leaves office in 2010 and who holds the political upper hand.
Unless there is strong public opinion, the decisions about new projects often hinge on political wheeling and dealing, especially in the Legislature.
ASIMO, the world’s most advanced humanoid robot, can’t drive his own car yet, but he is helping manufacturers make vehicles safer.
Twenty-one years of technology have allowed the all-seeing, all-hearing and sometimes-dancing Asimo to evolve from a disembodied set of legs that took up to 20 seconds to pace a single step into a robot that can slalom through road cones and run at 6 kmh.
The latest version of the Asimo robot is touring Australia and will be in Sydney until December 2.
Its engineering achievements have required scientists for the car maker Honda, the company behind Asimo, to master the skills that govern locomotion, such as how humans shift their weight as they walk. This technology has subsequently been adapted to help prevent vehicles from swerving, according to Hongsiri Suesattabongkot, a Honda engineer and former robotics student at the University of NSW.
The mechanical midget, which at 1.3 metres tall would barely be able to peer over a steering wheel, has also been responsible for a technology that warns drivers about impending collisions.
Advances in technology have been astounding over the last decade. Electronics are starting to be built into everything from vacuums to toothbrushes and slowly, but surely, computers will become an invaluable part of every aspect of daily living. Someday, you’l be able to take a shower and the bathroom will not only detect you, it will adjust the height of the sink to your level and set the water temperature to 96 degrees, just the way you like it.
Taking care of the elderly will become much easier, as well. Remember Rosie from The Jetsons? She was able to cook and clean and even read their son, Elroy, a bedtime story. It may be a long time before we see a robot that we’re actually able to communicate with, but robots that cook and clean are already in production. Think about your elderly loved ones. Instead of having to send them away to a retirement home, they’ll be able to spend their remaining years at home with you, where they should be. And you won’t have to worry about leaving them alone or making sure they’re taking their medication.
Now, it’s really going to take a long time before robots are advanced enough to fully take care of us, so don’t start believing that they’re going to take all our jobs. But robots, or more likely just computers, will be built into everything and make life easier. Instead of a robotic nurse pushing grandpa around in a wheelchair, the robot may actually be the wheelchair. Grandpa will simply have to think about which direction he wants to move and his robotic chair will follow.
Someday the robots will rise up and kill us all. They’ll record our lives, obliterate our privacy, set off nuclear war, and eventually turn on us and eat our brains. If any of this ever did happen, it would serve us right. We, at least American consumers, don’t deserve the future that robots really have to offer.
Recent evidence abounds. What’s more appalling a tlevision commercial depicting an industrial automotive robot committing suicide or the public outcry that followed? We have a robot psychiatrist (more on her later) and an entire country – South Korea, not the U.S. (for now) – committed to the “ethical treatment” of robots. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.
It isn’t all the fault of U.S. consumers. Our robotics expectations buckle under the massive burden of fantasy robotics. Our conception of consumer robotics is steered, almost entirely, by science fiction. We confer personalities and cognitive thought on robots before we even see them. We assume that they’ll have human emotions and foibles.
