Japan and the humanising of the robots
Robot pet dogs leave owners desolate on their demise
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By Timo Paukku
The robotics football World Cup or "Robocup" tournaments are played nearly every second year in Japan. And no wonder. The country is a world leader in robotics.
The Japanese also seem to have no qualms at all about humanising their robots. Every big Japanese corporation now has its own robotics department, according to a recent article by Leo Lewis in The Times.
And this does not mean crane-shaped industrial robots that reach out their gangly metal arms and perform jerky, repetitive movements on an assembly line, but "creature-like" robots: in human shape, or android dogs and cats.
Sony and Honda are in the forefront of developing the robotinoids. Honda’s two-legged humanoid ASIMO can already climb up and down a flight of stairs, while Sony’s Qrio can sing and dance - and this has prompted Toyota to come up with a tin trumpeter.
Toyota’s latest robot played When you wish upon a star before the press last March. Considering that Qrio has also conducted a symphony orchestra, musicians everywhere should be on their guard.
Japanese politicians and industrial bosses transport their metal friends around the world, and the tin men even accompany ministers on official visits.
The phenomenal success in the Japanese market of the robot pet pup Aibo tells us that the robofying of the home is only a matter of time.
Consumers have mourned the demise of their Aibos as if they were real pets. They swear blindly to manufacturers Sony that their particular example had a "personality" that set it apart from the normal cloned microchip-pooches coming off the production line. It was probably only a programming glitch, but...
It is not only in the realm of football and the Robocup that the Japanese are forging ahead. Sony’s Qrio project will soon be fitting into humanoid shape the memory capacity of 300 powerful desktop PCs. Researchers hope that before long the robot will be able to reflect on its actions and itself. Existentialism goes robotic.
According to a recent survey made of the Japanese robotics industry, the market in that country for these humanoid and animal-like robots will be in excess of EUR 50 billion by 2025. Above all, robots will be brought in to clean for and look after the ageing population.
This property would seem to suggest that the devices will need to be equipped with a pleasant smile and a good pair of hands. Humans seem to have a powerful urge to create beings in the likeness of those that evolution has taken millions of years to develop.
At least from the days of Fritz Lang’s great sci-fi movie Metropolis (1927), robots have been made to look "human". There is no reason for them to be so. In the smart-home of fifty years from now, a robot could just as easily be part of the dust particles floating in the air or an item of furniture.
Nevertheless, Japanese robotics professor Shigeki Sugano believes that putting a human face and shape on robots has a Confucian explanation, at least in the Asian experience.
"The Japanese find it easier to be friendly to a creature that looks, at least on the surface, as though it might have a soul."
Apparently the Japanese are not alone in this.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 7.9.2004
More on this subject:
 Building a World (Robo)Cup football team in Vaasa
Links:
Honda ASIMO
Sony Qrio
Toyota and its trumpet-playing robot (Robotics Trends)
Sony Aibo Entertainment Robot
An Aibo for sale on eBay (good pictures)
The grandmama of them all: the Metropolis robot from the fevered imagination of Fritz Lang. Sony and the others still have quite a way to go.
TIMO PAUKKU / Helsingin Sanomat
timo.paukku@hs.fi
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