Asimo

On it’s roving promotional tour, Honda Motors has made its stop here at the University of Minnesota to show off the latest incarnation of it’s humanoid robot named “Asimo”. I just stopped by the demonstration to check this thing out for about 15 minutes before heading off to work, but I got to see some pretty astonishing stuff. First impression, the little guy was a lot smaller than I expected. He looked a lot like a little kid and even had a little kid’s voice to match. Kind of bizarre, definitely a little creepy.

It’s taken Honda 18 years of development to get this thing to simulate some pretty basic human actions. It’s not about to run off the stage and find Sarah Connor, but it is impressive nonetheless. They’ve really perfected the smooth multi-jointed movements in this generation, resulting in an amazingly life-like range of motion. During the demo, little Asimo did a hula dance (!), walked up and down a flight of stairs, and demonstrated some of its campy pre-programmed gestures. The crowd was eating it up.

The artificial intelligence aspect of the project is just as impressive as the hardware itself. Asimo can recognize and recall people based on body and facial recognition software, follow movement, and respond to commands. During the demonstration Asimo was controlled by specially trained robot controllers backstage, so the thrill of autonomous robotic thought was obscured a bit.

I wanted to shout “Can it fire a gun?! How much damage can it take!?”, but my better judgment got the best of me. Knife Throwing Robots™ won’t be taking over the world anytime in the near future, but hopefully by 2050 a robotic servant named “Miles” will be cooking my breakfast omelet, sorting out my dirty laundry, and deleting my junk mail all before I wake up.