Humanoid Robotics

Introduction

Sony has developed small but remarkable robots that can dance and sing for entertainment purposes.

Like never before, technology can bring imagination to life. The question is what will we conceive? For decades, popular culture has been enthralled with the possibility of robots that act and look like humans. We are promised by film, fiction and television that humanoids will cook for us, clean for us, become our best friends, teach our children, and even fall in love with us. So where are they? The forerunners are here already. Recently, the media has covered a surprising number of new humanoid robots emerging on the commercial market. Like many new technologies, these early generations of commercially available humanoids are costly curiosities, useful for entertainment, but little else. Yet, in time, they will accomplish a wide variety of tasks in homes, battlefields, nuclear plants, government installations, factory floors, and even space stations.

 Robonaut: A robot developed at NASA Johnson Space Center to inhabit the space station.

Humanoids will exhibit emotion, forge relationships, make decisions, and develop as they learn through interaction with the environment. Robots that can incrementally acquire new knowledge from autonomous interactions with the environment will accomplish tasks by means their designers did not explicitly implement, and will adapt to unanticipated circumstances of unstructured environments. Already, humanoid robots can autonomously perform task decomposition necessary to carry out high-level, complex commands given through gesture and speech. Humanoids can adapt and orchestrate existing capabilities as well as create new behaviors using a variety of machine learning techniques. In fact, some researchers claim to have implemented a first stab at the "seed" which will allow robot intelligence to develop indefinitely. As they adapt to their own, unique experiences with the world, we will look out upon a population where no two humanoids are exactly alike.

Humanoids may prove to be the ideal robot design to interact with people. After all, humans tend to naturally interact with other human-like entities; the interface is hardwired in our brains. Their bodies will allow them to seamlessly blend into environments already designed for humans. Historically, we humans have adapted to the highly constrained modality of monitor and keyboard. In the future, technology will adapt to us. Undoubtedly, humanoids will change the way we interact with machines and will impact how we interact with and understand each other.

Humanoid Robotics also offers a unique research tool for understanding the human brain and body. Already, humanoids have provided revolutionary new ways for studying cognitive science. Using humanoids, researchers can embody their theories and take them to task at a variety of levels. As our understanding deepens, we will be prompted to freshly reexamine fundamental notions such as dualism, will and consciousness that have spurred centuries of controversy within Western thought.

This site traverses a wide variety of Humanoid Robotics projects throughout the world, explaining the diverse goals of the field and why humanoid robots are uniquely suited to meet these goals. As we review successes and failures in the field, we provide a contextual backdrop for understanding where humanoid research began, the dilemmas it currently struggles with, and where it may take us in the future. Imagination is the bow from which the technology, science and art of Humanoid Robotics takes flight. As we try to discern where the bow is aimed, the paper also asks whether we are ready for the changes that will follow.

Historical Perspectives

Humanity has long been fascinated by the possibility of automata (from the Greek "automatos," acting of itself). In the second century B.C., Hero of Alexander constructed statues, doors and small mechanical animals that could be animated by water, air and steam pressure. By the eighteenth century, elaborate mechanical dolls were able to write short phrases, play musical instruments, and perform other simple, life-like acts. 1  Today, robots are no longer mere curiosities, but have become an indispensable pillar of global industry. We have millions of factory automation robots carrying out complex tasks around the clock. From clockwork, gear-filled devices, we have arrived at lethal instruments of war such as the unmanned military vehicles vividly demonstrated to the world during the 1991 liberation of Kuwait.

From the very beginning, our fascination extended beyond machine automation to the possibility of creating an entity with our own form and function. In Homer's Argosy, the bronze sentinel, Talos, was created and animated by Daedulus to guard the island of Thera. Written some time around the 3rd century A.D., the pre-Cabbalistic book of Jewish mysticism named the Sefer Yezirah (The Book of Creation) describes how numbers and letters can be arranged to correlate with the four elements of creation (Spirit of God, ether, water and fire) and provide a template for life itself. According to Jewish legend, certain great rabbis used their programming prowess to instill life in an effigy or golem, creating a human-like automaton that could carry out its master's command. 2

Even in myth, humans recognized the uniqueness of their intelligence and the staggering difficulty of replicating it. The legend acknowledged that although the golem could perform simple tasks as it was ordered, it would never possess ru'ah - the breath of life bestowed on Adam in the primordial creation. This myth provides an interesting context for examining the past, present and future of Humanoid Robotics and raises some hard questions. Is human intelligence more than any encoding can capture, no matter how elegant or complex? How should we represent and impart knowledge. What is the best we can hope for?

Early Endeavors

 WABOT - 1 Humanoid Project at Waseda University

With the rise of the computer, people immediately began to envision the potential for encoding human intelligence into textual programs, but soon discovered that static programs and rule-based logic cannot capture the true essence of human intelligence. Early attempts to create artificial intelligence produced information-processing machines that operated on high-level human concepts, but had difficulty relating those concepts to actions and perceptions in the external world. Estranged from perception and action, such intelligence derived meaning only as an extension of the human creator or user.

Once embodied in real robots, such programs were confounded by noisy and all-too-often inconsistent data streaming in and out from a host of real-world sensors and actuators. Intricate path-planning routines allowed robots to optimally traverse their internal environments, but were rendered meaningless as soon as the robot, inevitably, became disoriented. This correspondence problem hindered robots’ ability to generalize knowledge and adapt behavior, resulting in hard-coded functionality applicable only to highly structured, specialized tasks such as factory automation. Most roboticists forsook the goal of human-like cognition entirely and focused on creating functional, high-utility agents.

Nonetheless, as roboticists continued, mostly from a mechanical point of view, to develop new robotic tools for a variety of purposes, they gained a new respect for the human body a platform that remains unmatched for versatility and adaptability. Accepting what they believed to be one of the greatest engineering challenges of all time, a few intrepid mechanical and electrical engineers began to build the world’s first humanoid robots. In 1973, the construction of a human-like robot was started at the Waseda University in Tokyo under the direction of the late Ichiro Kato. He and his group developed WABOT-1, the first full-scale anthropomorphic robot in the world. It consisted of a limb-control system, a vision system and a conversation system. WABOT-1 was able to communicate with a person in Japanese and to measure distances and directions to the objects using external receptors, artificial ears and eyes, and an artificial mouth. The WABOT-1 walked with its lower limbs and was able to grip and transport objects with touch-sensitive hands. At the time, it was estimated that the WABOT-1 had the mental faculty of a one-and-half-year-old child. In 1985, Kato and his research group at Waseda University built WASUBOT, a humanoid musician (WAseda SUmitomo roBOT), developed with Sumitomo Electric Industry Ltd. WASUBOT could read a musical score and play a repertoire of 16 tunes on a keyboard instrument. Since these early successes, the Japanese electronics and automotive industries have played a key role in the emergence of humanoids by creating robots of humanoids by developing robots capable of walking over uneven terrain, kicking a soccer ball, climbing stairs and performing dexterous tasks such as using a screwdriver and juggling. At the present time, we have full-scale humanoid robots that roughly emulate the physical dynamics and mechanical dexterity of the human body.

 WABOT-2, an anthropomorphic robot musician.

It remains to be seen to what extent we can breathe life into these creations. Ever since Karel Capek’s play "Rossum’s Universal Robots" captured the public’s imagination in 1921, popular film, fiction and television have ingrained in our minds the possibility of intelligent, anthropomorphic robots that may eventually eliminate and replace mankind. Is it possible that we will eventually find ourselves surpassed or even displaced by our own creations? Or will humanoid robots, despite our best efforts, remain little more than smart appliances? As we examine many of the top humanoid projects in the world, this paper presents the reader with a great diversity of projects that take us closer to an answer.