Newsmaker: In Japan, robots are people, too

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And there's a whole Aibo culture, correct? Aibo clubs and things like that?
Hornyak: Aibo clubs--oh yeah. (Some owners) document their lives with their Aibo robots in excruciating detail, really, and they post all kinds of photos of their Aibos. They bake birthday cakes for their Aibos when they turn a certain age, they bring Aibo to visit grandma, they take photos of Aibo and their little baby on the floor together. They dress their Aibos up in wigs, in cute little dolly clothes, they bring their Aibos on dates to Tokyo Disneyland.

Aibo is a story of how much Japanese are really willing to embrace household robots and accept them as members of their own family. When Aibo was terminated earlier this year there was a hue and cry, but as far as I know, Sony is not inclined to reverse the decision to put Aibo to sleep. I think it was quite a shortsighted decision, dictated by the bottom line, really.

And it wasn't just Aibo, it was Qrio, it was the whole entertainment robot unit.
Hornyak: That's right. I think it's interesting that it took a foreigner to be heading the firm, Howard Stringer--it took a foreigner, basically, to put Aibo to sleep. The Japanese just weren't willing to do this.

Aibo is a story of how much Japanese are really willing to embrace household robots and accept them as members of their own family.

So what happened to Sony's robot engineers?
Hornyak: I think they've been shifted to other branches of the company. I believe Sony is still running a kind of AI research unit.

There are other companies that you wouldn't think of as robotics specialists--certainly, Honda and Toyota. Why do companies like that get involved with personal robots?
Hornyak: On the one hand, some of these companies in Japan are getting into this for the PR benefits of having a really nifty humanoid robot walking around, to showcase their technological prowess. Other companies are more interested in developing robots as bona fide commercial products in the future. Toyota particularly is interested in developing things like helper dogs--instead of Seeing Eye dogs, a sort of robot helper dog, and they're looking at a time frame from, like, 2010 to 2020.

Your blog mentioned a new magazine called "Robot Life." How does that fit in?
Hornyak: There are several magazines like this, and more and more coming out in the market. There are quite a few magazines in Japan dedicated to these hobby robots--putting together your own, do-it-yourself robot kit, and I had that experience myself recently. I put together my own humanoid robot. These magazines like "Robot Life" are really cool because you can keep track of what's going on--the latest robots are all in here, not only the kits, but the more sophisticated humanoid showpieces in research labs and corporations like Honda.

What was the robot that you built?
Hornyak: It's a new product called Manoi AT-01 (from Kyosho, a company known for remote-controlled boats and cars). It's designed as an athlete humanoid robot, and they want to have things like humanoid Manoi tournaments--they'll do obstacle courses, that kind of thing. What's cool about Manoi is it's designed for tinkerers.

They told me it would take, like, 9 hours to put together. It took me more like 25, but that's because I'm maybe all-thumbs when it comes to these kinds of things. It was really tough for me to plow through the 100-page Japanese instruction manual and figure out "Omigod, I've just screwed in the leg assembly in reverse, and it's going to walk backwards now." But what was interesting about putting together this robot, which is composed of 17 servo motors in a plastic shell, you can hook it up to your computer by a USB cable and program it using bundled software and you can do sequences of moves. I downloaded from the Kyosho Web site a sequence that includes bowing and dancing. That's pretty simple to do once you get the hang of it.

Putting together a simple robot with 17 actuators for me was really challenging, and let me tell you that at some points I was not loving that machine.

With this robot I really got an appreciation of how amazing advanced robots like (Honda's) Asimo are--how much they are just mechanical masterpieces. Putting together a simple robot with 17 actuators for me was really challenging, and let me tell you that at some points I was not loving that machine. I was ready to chuck my little Manoi through the window, but I stuck with it and now I think of him as a little baby in a way, a little child. Especially when you put the plastic frame on him, the shell on him, he really gains a personality. You start thinking of it not just as a collection of over 100 parts but as an entity, as a being--he has this expression, he kind of looks like he needs some robot Prozac or something. He looks like he is little bit down in the dumps, so it's endearing. You have to have empathy for these things.

The Wakamaru robot looks kind of like a shop vac for the most part, with arms, but then it's got eyes, too. I believe Wakamaru tracks you, looks at you.
Hornyak: Sure, it can do face tracking and you have those puppy dog eyes in Wakamaru. Again, it comes back to this whole thing of the engineering side of robotics and the design side. Japanese are really strong in uniting both halves. They are really impressive at putting faces on their robots and giving form to their robots, so that they become much more believable as entities and living beings, not just clockwork.

How do think the Japanese relationship is going to change with robots, as more robots come into houses, workplaces?
Hornyak: I think that one issue of concern will be--aside from safety, which they are now addressing--how far really are people are going to be going with their relationship to robots. I think we will need robot psychologists in future, like in the Isaac Asimov books--not psychologists to deal with robots with depression or some kind of other psychological problem, but experts who will deal with people who have developed relationships with robots that are excessive attachments, that kind of thing.

What is the next big breakthrough with Japanese robotics?
Hornyak: AI and costs are the biggest hurdles to the next big breakthrough. I think AI is going to take a lot of work in fundamental research, and a lot of that is going on in the States. But in the States, it's very much of a military-oriented funding scheme. The thrust here is very military in nature, and this is quite horrific to the Japanese. It's really goes against the tradition in Japan.

So I think the next big breakthrough is going to be when cost comes down a lot and when AI is ramped up significantly. When actuators become a lot less expensive than they are. My robot--the household, hobby, do-it-yourself robot kit--cost 150,000 yen roughly (about $1,300). It's the actuators that make it cost so much.

Do you have favorite robot?
Hornyak: I think my favorite robot has to be Astro Boy. He's a fictional robot, but he remains kind of the ideal that all robots can aspire to, in Japan at least. He fights for peace, he's a got a nuclear power core--he was created a couple of years after the atomic bomb hit on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--so he really represents technology used for pacifist purposes. And he is also really cute.

The thing is, he really wanted to be human as much as possible. He really wanted parents like the human school children that he went to class with. He is a mirror for human beings and the way they see themselves. All robots are really a reflection of ourselves in machine form.

 

More Newsmakers

[Llib Setag]

woah

That "T-H" robot in the photo almost looks human...

[lingsun]

They're not robots in the true sense

They are machines that are meant to similute robots. They aren't robots in the classic sense--like R2D2 from Star Wars or Isaac Asimov's robots. There aren't going to be self-aware robots any time soon that see, hear, and obey spoken commands.

[DeusExMachina]

Of course they are

OF course they are robots in the "true" sense, whatever that means.
If you are talking about the term coined by Karel ?apek, this is
exactly how it was used. It is also compatible with the modern
dictionary definition.
As for your own criteria, there are already existing devices that
satisfy all your requirements, including vision, audition, and the
ability to respond to spoken commands.
Where have you been the last 15 years?

[technewsjunkie]

The Japanese will own the home robot market of the future

Unlike the U.S. were companies are tied to short term results,
the Japanese plan _decades_ in advance.

Ford and GM didn't learn in the 70's! Look at them now as
Toyota
is kicking butt, again. They have been making better products,
period! Better design, better aestheics, better reliability and
resale value.

Short term gains vs long term strategic planning. The future will
be replete with robots - in the home - and the Japanese will
dominate

[Llib Setag]

Redmond, we have a robot...

MS Robotics software today, MSRobots tommorrow?

God help us all...

[hakuta_cn]

This is Japanese.
Excuse me, but I want to use in my poor English

There are a doll culture in Japan for a long time, and we are healed by importing my feelings to dolls, and feelings are assumed to be a foothold to dolls.
And, Japanese feels the attachment for what the person made like Hinaningyo and the Akihabara figures, because they have a philosophy that a god in all places since the past and they doesn't have a stereotype of only god.
So this is not to be able to explain simply in order to have continued for a long time even in 1000.

In addition, most Japanese will not agree to the part "Japan's pacifist reaction to the atomic bomb blasts of World War II".
As for the Japanese, the group tends to do group action from the first. Most Japanese is only peaceful because Japan is peaceful by chance. On the contrary I think that most Japanese will abnormally be strong like World War I if Japan tries to get to be the militarism.

[khtervola]

The future may be much better than what we suspect: http://hubpages.com/hub/Future-Paradise

Robot Repair's Woman (A short story)

At the times long past when robots were a new thing, there were many types of computers and still every now and then there surfaces a problem or two caused by those old type of robots with no inbuild moral, no feelings, no human-related skills and even no common sense. But generally such problems are scarce, since the present day robot brains are so far developed, so much more able than the old ones that there just is no point in going back in time and using the elementary calculating machines of the old times.
But there still is one job in which one meets these kinds of old machines: that of a robot repair's man or woman. Very many of the robots that need repairing, actually are of the oldest type. Take Mary for example, she is a robot repair's woman in a small shop specialiced to kid's old machines. It is typical for kids that they want to try everything out by themselves. And since all of them don't have a good enough brain for understanding why the present day androids just HAVE TO be the way they are, they try out all possible other combinations and often succeed in causing disasters.
Take for example Pete's old storage hall robot which has been supplied with some mechanical intelligence, the ability to move and sense and a human-interface but not much else. The ten years old Pete programmed it to treat humans like storage artifacts and to care for money only. So what is one gonna do with such a robot? It is clearly dangerous! So Pete's parents arranged it to be repaired to be safe again. So what is Mary gonna do with it?
Mary is clever. She knows profitability-based moral by heart and can see no point in having computers with less than full emotional life. So she asks the kid who owns the robot:
"Do You think that a wiseclever one or A STUPID one does better in life and earns more?! Is there any point in being intelligent, any advantage?" So they agree that there is some point to it and no point in making the robot slave stupid, since after all it is a mechanical creature dedicated to its programming and not a lying being. And since Pete has gone to school, they manage to agree that holistically objective is what the robot ought to be and that's it.
So what should a holistically objective computer think about things, what shoud it at least notice? The basic mechanical truths it surely can take into account. It knows that a fully functioning artifact is better than a broken one, more useful. So make it apply that piece of understanding to living beings too: human values are born, and in harmony with the demands of the modern working life! At the level of the whole the same idea produces both caring for the future of the living kind and the fast development of technology to multiple purposes.
What about the robot feelings then? A robot feels for its goalsetting like a good worker does. It feels for all the things it needs to do to achieve it's goals. So with one important objective mechanical correction about a fully functioning one working better than a broken one, and by sticking to holistic objectivity, Mary has managed to get the robot's emotional life all right again: fully loving and responsible.

www.feelingrobots.info