Toyota Humanoid Robot Runs At 7 Km/hr - Awesome Vid
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While everyone's busy moaning about the economy and how terrible everything is, I've been looking down the road five or ten years and I see amazing things coming at us, fast.
Right now, robots only work in spaces explicitly designed for them, which has really limited their effectiveness. They're going to be able to move beyond that into more human spaces, which has two major advantages: A lot of human spaces exist, and those spaces are set up to do more different things, which robots will be able to participate in. An assembly line is a fine thing, but not terribly flexible. (Though increasingly, this is a fuzzy line, and the line will get fuzzier; indeed, this is one of the effects I am anticipating.)
Computer vision seems to have taken a new step forward lately, and while they're still miles away from "full human vision" (which is AI-strong, ultimately), they're moving from total toy problems into really useful problems.
Brain interaction is also moving forward lately.
Now, you might say I'm not being specific. Well, here's why. In the five-to-ten year timescale, what I see is that where today these things are still the cutting edge of research, in the five-to-ten year timeframe this is going to be available to small startups and dedicated hobbyists. I don't know exactly what will be made of advanced computer vision and smart robots and direct brain interaction and another five-to-ten years of hardware development and two guys in a garage (oh, and we'll still have the internet, of course, and pervasive cellular connections), but I find it quite likely that it'll be very significant... in exactly the same way the Internet is significant. It may take a genius to push the frontier of computer vision or robotics, but thanks to the miracle of programming, it won't take geniuses to apply them in new ways.
Also, I could probably go on for another three or four times longer, but this is an HN comment, not an essay. (Though maybe I should make it a blog post.)
You wake up today and it's much the same as yesterday, but you know, look back at what the Internet has done to so many industries in the past ten years, and what it has yet to do, and I think you start to get a reference frame for what we may be looking at with the convergence of some of this stuff. I know I'm not giving you product names and the bullet-point feature lists, but that would be almost exactly like me trying to predict Facebook back in 1990. Even those who were on the right track in the broad sense were wrong in many ways... but they were right that big things were coming.
Big things are coming.
One way we humans learn is by observing things, trying to immitate them and learning from the feedback (either physical or via communication). If that principle takes hold in robot development, the "evolution" of robots could get much speedier I believe.
The ability to act in the physical world and actually cause things to happen, cause reactions, is what differentiates robots from other types of computers. So that's what I would try to exploit thinking about the principles of programming robots.
If someone has a reference to some technical details, though, I'd be very interested.
It uses an IMU, optical vision, lidar, encoders, force sensors, and ground contact sensors.
Why do you think joint angles alone would be enough?
Again, thanks for digging that up. It's heaps better than idle speculation.
But something like the above, that has:
Enough hand eye coordination to catch a rolling ball.
Enough facial recognition to sort of be able to tell people apart, like a human who's bad with faces.
Enough speech parsing to understand simple command even if you have to repeat them a few times.
Enough knowledge, I'm thinking something like Wolfram Alpha here, to able to be instructed to perform simple tasks.
Then it could do simple tasks like clean behind the toilet or work the fryolator at McDonald's. And if it's mass manufactured and cheap enough to build and cheap enough to buy, then we could see something interesting.
The slow uptake of humanoid robots into the everyday workforce. How long before we have robot janitors?
It single-handedly licked my kitty-litter tracking problem. it keeps my place completely swept on a weekly basis (I've a small studio loft, nothing huge) - preventing me from stepping on the odd tiny rock that was drug in by my workboots. It devours dust/hair bunnies which come with long hair and a cat. I never swept so the 120$ woot price on the roomba has changed my place from gritty to well kept.
Altho damn, now I wish it scrubbed the floor behind the toilet.
Back to the meat there - I think that the next advance in robotics is going to be alongside artificial limbs and human assistance devices. AI introduction into society seems to receive such strong philosophical opposition that I doubt we'll see much in the next 10 years.
YMMV.
Sometimes I get the feeling that making robots as similar as possible to humans is a goal in itself, and that, I think, is not a useful dogma.
And Asimov was right. Alas, it will not be that easy.
The robot is named "Asimo".
[Eric Cartman voice] "You can trust Awesom-o. In fact, you should tell Awesom-o all your most personal secrets. Awesom-o will not make fun of you or tell your secrets to other people and stuff."