Domestic robots failed to ride to rescue after No. 1 plant blew | Hacker News Reader

Domestic robots failed to ride to rescue after No. 1 plant blew

japantimes.co.jp

29 pointsbane10 comments

Asimo is a marketing toy. It wouldn't be able to navigate through a child's playroom, much less an environment full of hazards. The walking technology they are using is exactly one hundred percent wrong for anything "real world".

Looks great though.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Asimo can even have problems with pre-defined stairs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTlV0Y5yAww

Please, make the title show it refers to Japanese, not home, robots. People at GMT+3 and higher will wake up soon and most won't be able to figure it out before the first cup of coffee kicks in. Many will think of Roomba's rescuing injured people. ;-)

The short answer is: radiation.

Military robots are hardened. Civilian robots are not.

Naturally. The article discusses that.

Remember, the reason the article exists (IMO) is because of the inherent shock of hearing that the nation so often reputed for being the world leader in robotics was forced to depend on US robots.

Personally, I'm hoping it will spur the nation to spend a little more time on (ahem) practical robots...

There's also some major confusion between bipedal bots, which are almost exclusively toys for PR consumption / blue sky research, and Japan's (true, demonstrable) edge in robots which actually do useful stuff ever. (The overwhelming majority are in factories, and they're about as sexy as ERP systems. These are not all that useful for novel tasks in arbitrary environments for the same reason that screwdrivers make poor dental instruments.)

Right. Japan excels in robotics, but for a variety of reasons didn't excel in the particular type of robot needed in this instance.

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but it's true that legged robots are becoming a reality, and showing their usefulness in real-world locomotion tasks. See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL0aiQAm4RU

This hexapod uses more energy to get from A to B, about 2x more IIRC, but it's able to clear some rock fields, sand, and brush that would give wheeled or tracked robots trouble.

I doubt this, although I'd be interested to be corrected.

For instance, the iRobot-developed PackBot, which is "military" in that thousands are used in Iraq and Afghanistan, has no rad-hardening that I know of (and no rad-hard version). (Packbots were used at Fukishima.)

I can't imagine why there would be a rad-hard Packbot, because doing so would involve trading off performance like weight or processing power. Here's the best link I could find:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/04/19/...

I also found some mentions of radiation-hardened robots sent from the US to Japan, but always with the same wording, and then no mentions of their being used.

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