SoylentNews

RobotMonster writes:

phys.org reports a new restaurant has opened in China's eastern province of Jiangsu that is staffed mostly by robots:

Two robots are stationed by the door to cheerfully greet customers, while four short but humanoid machines carry trays of food to the tables. In the kitchen, two large blue robots with glowing red eyes specialise in frying, while another is dedicated to making dumplings.

The cooking robots are loaded with ingredients by human staff, who also help to make some dishes.

Each robot costs around $6,500, which is roughly equal to the annual salary of a human employee. Rising labour costs in China have encouraged manufacturers to turn to automation, and the country last year surpassed Japan to become the world's biggest consumer of industrial robots.

I can't help but be reminded of Bender explaining "There was nothing wrong with that food. The salt level was 10% less than a lethal dose."

Phoenix666 writes:

The world's first robotic kitchen prepares crab bisque for breakfast:

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited along to a warehouse in north London to see what is being billed as "the world's first automated kitchen." The system, made by Moley Robotics in the UK, can only make crab bisque right now—and it requires that all of the ingredients and utensils are pre-positioned perfectly. The goal, though, is to have a consumer-ready version within two years, priced at around £10,000 ($14,600). The company envisions an "iTunes style library of recipes" that you can download and have your robot chef prepare.

In its current form, the Moley Robotic Kitchen is essentially two very expensive robotic arms, with two even dearer fully articulated biomimetic humanoid hands made by the Shadow Robot Company on the ends. In front of the robot is a kitchen—a sink, a stovetop, an oven, and a range of utensils, including the aforementioned blender. The ingredients are placed in bowls and cups on the worktop. Once everything is set up, an engineer simply presses "start" on the controlling PC, the robot arms whirl around for 30 minutes, and voilà: crab bisque.

Simply stunning. Fresh from the arms of your android girlfriend, you awake from a coding/WoW binge to a delicately prepared breakfast of crab bisque. Geek nirvana, here we come!

microtodd writes:

A while back we discussed robot furniture. Now a restaurant in San Francisco is trying to build and run a restaurant run entirely by robots. Now granted, these are not robots like in Asimov's Robot Series. Instead of humanoid-style robots, these are highly specialized, single-purpose machines.

I can foresee a future populated by many, many robots, in which we didn't notice that we were surrounded by them — we were looking for Rosie the Robot and instead got inconspicuous robots that act as automated furniture and interactive surroundings.

What do my fellow Soylenters think? Are we on the verge of a "Robot Revolution" — even if it doesn't look like how 50s sci-fi imagined it would?

Phoenix666 writes:

Yamaha unveiled the "Motobot" at the Tokyo Motor Show on Wednesday. According to the company, it's an "autonomous motorcycle-riding humanoid robot built around a fusion of Yamaha's motorcycle and robotics technology".

It adds: "R&D is currently underway with the goal of developing the robot to ride an unmodified motorcycle on a racetrack at more than 200 km/h. The task of controlling the complex motions of a motorcycle at high speeds requires a variety of control systems that must function with a high degree of accuracy."

It remains to be seen if Motobot does ultimately surpass Rossi, who currently rides for Movistar Yamaha MotoGP. With one race left in the 2015 season, he's leading the title chase, with a seven point advantage over team-mate Jorge Lorenzo.

The world has been lacking motorcyclists with even less fear of death.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A humanoid obsessive has built an incredibly realistic female robot from scratch - and it's got more than a passing resemblance to Avengers star Scarlett Johansson.

Ricky Ma, a 42-year-old product and graphic designer, has spent more than $50,000 (£34,000) and a year and a half creating the female robot prototype, Mark 1.

The designer confirmed the scarily lifelike humanoid had been modelled on a Hollywood star, but wanted to keep her name under wraps.

It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone and has moving facial expressions, but Ricky says creating it wasn't easy.

He said he was not aware of anyone else in Hong Kong building humanoid robots as a hobby and that few in the city understood his ambition.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Japanese researchers have designed a robot that can avoid overheating its motors by "sweating":

The researchers, from the University of Tokyo's JSK Lab led by Professor Masayuki Inaba, were trying to figure out how to add a cooling system to their 1.7-meter tall, 56-kilogram musculoskeletal humanoid named Kengoro (who joins Kojiro and Kenshiro as part of the JSK robot family). Kengoro is already stuffed to the brim with structural components, circuit boards, gears, and 108 motors (!), and there was simply no room to add active water cooling with tubes and a radiator and fans. The researchers started looking at how they could make better use of Kengoro's existing components, and they came up with the idea of using the robot's skeletal structure (its metal frame) as a coolant-delivery system.

The approach goes way beyond just running water channels through the frame and circulating water through them, since that wouldn't have solved the problem of needing to place a radiator in there somewhere. The researchers instead decided to try a passive technique, allowing the water to seep out through the frame around the motors to cool them evaporatively. In other words, Kengoro sweats.

[...] Kengoro can run for half a day on about a cup of deionized water, although just like you, it has to keep itself hydrated for the cooling to be effective, especially if it's working hard. Testing shows that this method of cooling works three times better than air cooling, and significantly better than just circulating water through the interior channel, although it's not as effective as a traditional radiator using active cooling. In practice, this means that Kengoro can run at full power longer, letting it do push-ups for 11 minutes straight without burning out its motors.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Humanoid robots could be used to stretch and strain bioengineered tissues, providing them a suitable environment for growth:

Right now, tissue engineering relies on bioreactors to grow sheets of cells. These machines often look like large fish tanks, filled with a rich soup of nutrients and chemicals that cells need to grow on a specialized trellis. The problem, explain Mouthuy and Carr, is that bioreactors currently "fail to mimic the real mechanical environment for cells." In other words, human cells in muscles and tendons grow while being stretched and moved around on our skeletons. Without experiencing these natural stresses, the tissue grafts produced by researchers often have a broad range of structural problems and low cell counts.

That's where robots come in. The researchers propose a "humanoid-bioreactor system" with "structures, dimensions, and mechanics similar to those of the human body." As the robot interacted with its environment, tissues growing on its body would receive the typical strains and twists that they would if they grew on an actual human. The result would be healthy tissue, grown for the exact area on the body it was destined to replace. Mouthuy and Carr note that this would be especially helpful for "bone-tendon-muscle grafts... because failure during healing often occurs at the interface between tissues."

What would this humanoid-bioreactor system look like? It could possibly be built on top of a humanoid robot with "soft robotics" muscles made from electroactive polymers, and the growing muscles could piggyback on those to get their exercise. It would also need to be covered in soft, stretchable sensors to monitor the health of the growing tissues.

Growing tissue grafts on humanoid robots: A future strategy in regenerative medicine? (open, DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aam5666) (DX)

Original Submission

FatPhil writes:

Atlas, the hulking humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics, now does backflips.

To be clear: Humanoids aren't supposed to be able to do this. It's extremely difficult to make a bipedal robot that can move effectively, much less kick off a tumbling routine. The beauty of four-legged robots is that they balance easily, both at rest and as they're moving, but bipeds like Atlas have to balance a bulky upper body on just two legs. Accordingly, you could argue that roboticists can better spend their time on non-human forms that are easier to master.

But there's a case to be made for Atlas and the other bipeds like Cassie (which walks more like a bird than a human). We live in a world built for humans, so there may be situations where you want to deploy a robot that works like a human. If you have to explore a contaminated nuclear facility, for instance, you'll want something that can climb stairs and ladders, and turn valves. So a humanoid may be the way to go.

Source: https://techxplore.com/news/2017-11-atlas-robot-backflip.html

Also: https://www.wired.com/story/atlas-robot-does-backflips-now/

takyon: Don't forget the new SpotMini as seen at The Verge, Quartz, and Popular Mechanics. Even Ethanol-fueled couldn't stop it.

Original Submission #1   Original Submission #2

martyb writes:

Increasingly Human-Like Robots Spark Fascination and Fear:

Sporting a trendy brown bob, a humanoid robot named Erica chats to a man in front of stunned audience members in Madrid.

She and others like her are a prime focus of robotic research, as their uncanny human form could be key to integrating such machines into our lives, said researchers gathered this week at the annual International Conference on Intelligent Robots.

"You mentioned project management. Can you please tell me more?" Erica, who is playing the role of an employer, asks the man.

She may not understand the conversation, but she's been trained to detect key words and respond to them.

A source of controversy due in part to fears for human employment, the presence of robots in our daily lives is nevertheless inevitable, engineers at the conference said.

The trick to making them more palatable, they added, is to make them look and act more human so that we accept them into our lives more easily.

In ageing societies, "robots will coexist with humans sooner or later", said Hiroko Kamide, a Japanese psychologist who specialises in relations between humans and robots.

Welcoming robots into households or workplaces involves developing "multipurpose machines that are capable of interacting" with humans without being dangerous, said Philippe Soueres, head of the robotics department at a laboratory belonging to France's CNRS scientific institute.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In recent years, sex dolls have become increasing sophisticated and realistic in their resemblance to human beings, including mechanized components, and are thus now referred to as humanoid sex robots. Some media outlets have gone as far as to suggest that sex robots and other social robots will eventually become almost indistinguishable from humans.

This has sparked a number of interesting ethical and philosophical debates related to the significance of these robots and the possibility that future machines will replicate the physical intimacy between two people. In a recent study featured in Springer's International Journal of Social Robotics, two researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Bergamo in Italy have taken a closer look at some of the current arguments and predictions about sex robots, carrying out an ethics-based and critical discourse analysis.

"We started our joint research to debunk some myths and misunderstandings in the media regarding the future of artificial intelligence," Deborah Johnson and Mario Verdicchio, the two researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "We were struck by how fundamentally flawed some of the ideas were and especially the assumption that the computational version of some aspects of reality are the same as the real thing."

In their paper, Johnson and Verdicchio essentially challenge the perception of humanoid sex robots as robotic substitutes of lovers and companions. They argue that although humanoid robots may look and act more and more like human beings in the future, the claim that they will eventually replace humans is far-fetched and far from a certainty.

"Our research is aimed at showing that humanoid sex robots could come to be understood in ways that keep their status as machines, albeit technologically very sophisticated machines." Johnson and Verdicchio said.

Deborah G. Johnson et al. Constructing the Meaning of Humanoid Sex Robots, International Journal of Social Robotics (2019). DOI: 10.1007/s12369-019-00586-z

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Entire Boston Dynamics robot line-up dances in the new year:

Boston Dynamics is sending off 2020 with its most impressive robot video to date – showing off its entire range dancing to the classic song "Do You Love Me?"[¹]. The fun video offers the first glimpse at two Atlas robots working together while also highlighting just how quickly this technology is developing.

Back in 2018 Boston Dynamics released a cute video of its dog-like Spot robot dancing to "Uptown Funk"[²]. The playful video was a fun little demonstration of Spot's broad range of movements, exciting at the time but very simplistic looking back from the vantage of today. Now the company has stepped things up delivering a long choreographed dance video featuring not only Spot, but two Atlas robots and a special appearance from Handle, a wheeled model.

Released as a kind of New Year's gift from the company, the video is the first look at two Atlas humanoid robots working together. Atlas, still technically a prototype robot, has demonstrated a stunningly rapid evolution over the past decade from barely being able to walk in 2013[³, to being allowed to roam tetherless in 2015[⁴], completing a spectacular parkour routine[⁵] just three years later, and finally getting acrobatic last year[⁶].

[¹] Do You Love Me?
[²] UpTown Spot
[³] With you, Spot can
[⁴] ATLAS Gets an Upgrade
[⁵] Boston Dynamics' Atlas Robot Can Do Parkour
[⁶] More Parkour Atlas

Also at c|net.

On the one hand, it is amazing to see the technological progress and what this portends for future capabilies. On the other hand, imagine a dystopian future where a dozen of these self-contained robots are on patrol and decide you are a target-of-interest.

What would you do? What could you do?

Original Submission

Elon Musk Reveals Plans to Unleash a Humanoid Tesla Bot

upstart writes:

Elon Musk reveals plans to unleash a humanoid Tesla Bot:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk ended a deeply technical AI Day event [(3h3m21s)] with a head-turning announcement: a humanoid robot.

After a dancing human dressed as a robot moved off stage at Thursday's invitation-only event in Palo Alto, California, Musk introduced Tesla Bot. It will be based on Tesla's Autopilot system and is essentially a humanoid form of the car. Musk considers the electric vehicles "fully sentient robots on wheels." So might as well make it a human-like bot!

The bot looks like a human with two arms (and two hands with five fingers) and two legs. It'll stand at 5 feet 8 inches and weigh 125 pounds. It can only run 5 mph, which Musk assured was slow enough for most people to escape if something goes wrong: "If you can run faster than that it’ll be fine."

Most importantly, Musk said it would be friendly ("of course") and operate dangerous, repetitive, and boring tasks as it "navigates a world built for humans."

Musk repeated that the humanoid would have a screen on its head and eight cameras, like on Tesla cars that can drive with assistance from Autopilot. "It's all the same tools we see in the car," he said.

Elon Musk Reveals Tesla Bot, a Humanoid Robot Utilizing Tesla's Vehicle AI

upstart writes:

The story continues at c|net:

Elon Musk reveals Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot utilizing Tesla's vehicle AI:

Three slides detailed the robot's proposed specifications and Musk made sure he pointed out you could both outrun the Tesla Bot and "overpower" it. He has, in the past, rallied against the use of robots as weapons and warned of the risks AI might pose -- once calling it the "biggest risk we face as a civilization." I guess if they're your incredibly slow, easy-to-overpower robots, the dangers are reduced.

One particular slide said they would eliminate "dangerous, repititive, boring tasks" and Musk provided an example suggesting the robot could be told to "go to the store and get ... the following groceries."

A prototype would likely be ready next year, he said.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Some robots were made to be your best friend. Some to unload 1600 boxes an hour. Some to do backflips, paint masterpieces. Some to inspect crime scenes. Others will tell you to quit smoking in prohibited areas and stop riding your motorbike on the footpath.

Singapore has started testing patrol robots that survey pedestrian areas in the city-state, where surveillance is a top and often controversial priority.

Named Xavier, the mall-cop robots will be autonomously rolling through the Toa Payoh Central district for three weeks from Sept. 5, scanning for "undesirable social behaviours" according to a press release (via Engadget) from the government's Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX).

[...] The "undesirable social behaviours" Xavier will be on the lookout for include congregation of more than five people (as per the government's COVID-19 measures), smoking in prohibited areas, illegal hawking, improperly parked bicycles within the Housing and Development Board's Hub, and riding motorised active mobility devices and motorcycles on footpaths.

If you're partaking in any of these activities while a Xavier rolls past, the robot will alert the project's command centre and display a message corresponding to your offence.

[...] Security robots are an unsettling and impending reality across the globe, including the U.S. where companies like Knightscope have been offering up their K5 security robots for years (yes, it's the company whose robot drowned itself; yes, the robot humans built an actual shrine for). As recently as 2020, Spot the robot dog from Boston Dynamics was used by NYPD at a crime scene. China has had police robots for years, equipped with facial recognition software.

Also at Engadget and Stuff.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Over a decade old, Honda's little humanoid robot astonishingly doesn't seem obsolete

Honda's ASIMO humanoid robot is retiring. For the last 20 years, ASIMO had been performing at the Honda showroom in Tokyo, Japan, but these regular demonstrations are now at an end. We've known for a while that this was coming—Honda announced back in 2018 that it was halting ASIMO development in favor of working on robots with more practical applications, like robots for elder care and disaster relief. But what blows me away about ASIMO, even now, is just how impressive it still is.

[...] This little robot really did set a (still somewhat aspirational) standard, especially relative to other humanoid robots, which have only within the last few years been able to match and then significantly surpass ASIMO's performance, if not its looks.

[...] But Honda has more recently seemed to realize that they could take the ASIMO platform and the philosophy of humanoid robotics that it represents only so far, and as of 2018 the company shifted development to a clearly ASIMO-inspired but much more robust robot called E2-DR.

The short article has some nice videos of ASIMO:
Performance video from 2010
History of Honda robotics
2017 demo
E2-DR demo

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The skin can realistically bend, stretch, and wrinkle as the finger curls and extends:

Roboticists from the University of Tokyo have taken a tiny step toward creating the Terminator. They've built an articulated robot finger that's seamlessly covered in living human skin.

[...] A relatively simple robotic finger with three moving joints was first submerged in a solution made up of collagen, a structural protein, and dermal fibroblasts, the primary type of human cells found in skin's connective tissue and its sub-surface dermis layer. This solution shrank and tightly conformed itself to the robotic finger, creating a flexible foundation on which to apply multiple layers of epidermal keratinocytes, the primary type of human cells found in skin's outer epidermis layer.

[...] This research is just the earliest steps toward creating believable humanoid bots, however. The layer of human skin covering the finger is far less durable than natural human skin, and the robot is unable to provide it with a constant supply of nutrients that would allow it to grow and regenerate. As a result, it doesn't last very long, but the researchers are hoping to improve its longevity with future iterations that incorporate more complex structures and functionality, including neurons that could allow it to feel, and even sweat glands—so one day, robots might even stink like we do.

Journal Reference:
Michio Kawai et al., Living skin on a robot [open], Matter, June 09, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2022.05.019

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Some people perceive robots that display emotions as intentional agents, study finds:

When robots appear to engage with people and display human-like emotions, people may perceive them as capable of "thinking," or acting on their own beliefs and desires rather than their programs, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"The relationship between anthropomorphic shape, human-like behavior and the tendency to attribute independent thought and intentional behavior to robots is yet to be understood," said study author Agnieszka Wykowska, PhD, a principal investigator at the Italian Institute of Technology. "As artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a part of our lives, it is important to understand how interacting with a robot that displays human-like behaviors might induce higher likelihood of attribution of intentional agency to the robot."

[...] In the first two experiments, the researchers remotely controlled iCub's actions so it would behave gregariously, greeting participants, introducing itself and asking for the participants' names. Cameras in the robot's eyes were also able to recognize participants' faces and maintain eye contact.

In the third experiment, the researchers programmed iCub to behave more like a machine while it watched videos with the participants. The cameras in the robot's eyes were deactivated so it could not maintain eye contact and it only spoke recorded sentences to the participants about the calibration process it was undergoing. [...]

The researchers found that participants who watched videos with the human-like robot were more likely to rate the robot's actions as intentional, rather than programmed, while those who only interacted with the machine-like robot were not. This shows that mere exposure to a human-like robot is not enough to make people believe it is capable of thoughts and emotions. It is human-like behavior that might be crucial for being perceived as intentional agent.

According to Wykowska, these findings show that people might be more likely to believe artificial intelligence is capable of independent thought when it creates the impression that it can behave just like humans. This could inform the design of social robots of the future, she said.

Previously:
Google Engineer Suspended After Claiming AI Bot Sentient

Journal Reference:
Serena Marchesi, Davide De Tommaso, Jairo Perez-Osorio, and Agnieszka Wykowska, Belief in Sharing the Same Phenomenological Experience Increases the Likelihood of Adopting the Intentional Stance Towards a Humanoid Robot, Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2022. DOI: 10.1037/tmb0000072.supp

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Human-shaped robots with dexterous hands will be staffing warehouses and retail stores, tending to the elderly and performing household chores within a decade or so, according to a Silicon Valley startup working toward that vision:

Demographic trends — such as a persistent labor shortage and the growing elder care crisis — make fully-functioning, AI-driven humanoid robots look tantalizingly appealing.

Companies such as Amazon are reportedly worried about running out of warehouse workers, whose jobs are physically and mentally demanding with high attrition.

A heavy-hitting startup called Figure, which just emerged from stealth mode, is building a prototype of a humanoid robot that the company says will eventually be able to walk, climb stairs, open doors, use tools and lift boxes — perhaps even make dinner.

[...] It will take decades for humanoid robots to be able to replicate the sophisticated things our bodies can do, but visionaries are hard at work trying to make it happen.

Previously: Elon Musk Reveals Plans to Unleash a Humanoid Tesla Bot

Original Submission