HRP-4 Hides It All Somewhere
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 16 of September , 2010 at 12:29 am
Kawada Industries and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (ASIT) have just unveiled the latest edition to their family of androids, the HRP-4. HRP-4 is designed “in the image of a lean but well-muscled track-and-field athlete,” and it certainly is pretty damn lean… At 5 feet tall it only weighs 86 pounds, and it boasts increased flexibility of its 34 joints over its predecessors. Despite its apparent lack of big fat heavy stuff like powerful motors, computers, and batteries, it has no trouble doing all of the important android basics:
HRP-4 is designed to aid in the development of robots that could replace humans in simple manual labor, specifically to address Japan’s impending labor shortage (due to an aging population and low birthrate). While I’m all for androids, when it comes to manual labor and repetitive tasks the human form (while adaptable) is not necessarily optimal, and I have to wonder whether it really makes sense to use humans as a research model in that respect.
HRP-4 will be available in 2011 for about $305,000.
VIA [ Physorg ] and [ Pink Tentacle ]
Comments (6)
Category: Androids
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Comment by Robotbling
Made Thursday, 16 of September , 2010 at 1:26 am
Developing the hardware and software for humanoids means you hit all the necessary bases, and more, to do human tasks. Sure, they could probably get away with less, but this platform gives them the chance to work on many more issues than they would otherwise.
I have collected photos and hi-def movies of the HRP-4 on my blog for those who might want more.
Comment by reader
Made Thursday, 16 of September , 2010 at 10:33 am
Wonder what the actual bottleneck still is, to make this guy take out the trash or drive a dump truck ?
Assuming infinite offboard grid computing power for instance ( high latency of course ) complemented by modest low latency computing onboard.
The actuators and sensors, plus mechanics seem all to be up to snuff already, so whats holding it back ?
Comment by Slave to Hypnosis
Made Thursday, 16 of September , 2010 at 11:26 am
Great looking robot looks like it does voice command and has the advantage of looking like a power ranger from tv?
Comment by Joey1058
Made Thursday, 16 of September , 2010 at 6:00 pm
The bottleneck, it seems to me, would be battery life. To be a true replacement for any human in a work environment, it’s going to need to run for at least a full eight hours. Attaching a power cable will limit it’s range of movement. And as anyone knows, the work environment is filled with daily invariables. If the bot can’t go to the other side of a room to deal with an unexpected task, it’s value is cut in half.
Comment by Richard
Made Sunday, 19 of September , 2010 at 2:04 am
Nowhere near as functional as ASIMO but then it’s much cheaper.
The bottleneck is intelligence: we don’t know how the brain does it and we can’t incorporate it in machines. AI is still very primitive.
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