Technique in Robot

Honda, for example, has for a decade been developing humanoid robots leading up to the present (aptly-named) Asimo. Asimo is the size of a human 10-year-old, and its body mass index (mass divided by square of height) is only slightly above that of a healthy human. There are, of course, other robot development programmes (humanoid and otherwise), but they are for the most part military or similar in emphasis; for scientific work, Asimo’s interest is in its civilian approach and also in the direction of its perceptual development – it will, among other things, respond intelligently to human gesture, posture and movement. I don’t seriously suggest that Asimo is yet the manifestation of Asimov’s dream, nor does it really matter whether this is the way forward: what matters is that it demonstrates the feasibility of onboard perceptual intelligence based on sophisticated algorithmic pattern recognition. In limited ways, Asimo responds to the external world as a human of two to five years might; in some other ways, it demonstrates how such responses might be managed in ways not analogous to the human.