Yesterday, ASIMO turned ten years old. It was also Halloween. Coincidence!?!!?!

Yes.

But, it’s still something to celebrate:

Honda has posted an inside look at the development of ASIMO, from waaaay back when Masato Hirose (now Executive Chief Engineer at Honda R&D) was initially told to make Astro Boy. Seriously. You can read about it here.

ASIMO has been around for so long now that we run the risk of taking him for granted, especially since he’s not generally considered to be practical (unless you count serving coffee or conducting an orchestra)… Honda deserves a lot of praise for spending who knows how much money over this period of time to continue to develop ASIMO. They must be pretty confident that the technologies inherent in ASIMO are going to pay off in a big way eventually, and I for one hope they’re right.

Anyway, it looks like ASIMO had a good time at his party:

And there’s more where that came from.

[ ASIMO ]

It’s not quite the real thing, but it will run around your desktop, take notes for you, and keep you up to date on the latest news from Honda (um, yay?). It’s a free download over at the Honda website.

[ Honda ]

Update- Honda’s Canada PR firm threatened me in a rather heavy-handed way, and I had to take the video down. ‘Cause I guess Honda has no need for good publicity or anything. Oh, Canada!

Or at least, that’s what this new commercial from Honda would have you believe. I don’t know much about Canadians, besides what everybody knows (plaid/hockey/moose/syrup/eh), but ASIMO looks like he fits right in.

Having said that, I’m curious: does this video creep you out at all? Does it seem unnatural to have ASIMO just hanging out with people, warming his hands by the fire, or hitchhiking on a lonely stretch of road? Is it weird, or is it a future you can picture comfortably (whether you’re a Canadian or not)?

[ Honda Canada ]

The Sundance Film Festival that took place last week featured a couple interesting robot films… This first one, by director Spike Jonze, is called I’m Here:

The film is 30 minutes long, and Entertainment Weekly says that it “feels like a modern-day retelling of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, with two crudely constructed robots serving as the protagonists.” It may show up in its entirety on the Independent Film Channel later this year.

VIA [ io9 ]

Honda was also at Sundance to screen a wonderful 8 minute documentary called Living With Robots, which is totally worth watching simply because of how well it sums up so many of the issues relevant to robotics today and in the near future:

Honda’s got it exactly right: the biggest hurdle to overcome when it comes to the future of robotics is not technical, but rather an issue of public perception. At the end of the video, Mark Rowlands says “whatever robots turn out to be, will largely be a function of us, and the decisions we make.” This is an excellent point… If we have concerns about robots, it’s important to acknowledge that those concerns generally can’t, by definition, be about the robots themselves. Rather, we must understand that robots are a reflection, or perhaps more accurately a physical embodiment, of human desire, and it’s those desires and how we act on them that need to be examined.

So if there are issues surrounding things like, oh, I don’t know, military robots, we need to recognize that military robots only exist because of human conflict. They’re not terminators, they’re not out to get us, they’re there because we made them and decided that they were important and necessary. This doesn’t answer the question of whether they’re a good idea or a bad idea, but the point is that you can’t look at robots as something separate from the human experience.

You can see more footage of those ASIMOs wandering around an office environment in this post from 2007.

[ Honda Press Release ]

Robot Watch attended ASIMO’s 9th birthday party last September, and took a bunch of pictures of the precursors to the capable little robot that we’re familiar with today. Check out pics of the whole series, after the jump. (Read more…)

Man, that Cracked video just keeps giving up gems. Turns out that the bit about ASIMO being able to identify objects by class came from a BBC show called James May’s Big Ideas… being a long-time Top Gear fan, I was able to immediately recognize his shaggy locks in the 0.5 second that they were visible in the video. Anyway, I’d like to reiterate what May says in the beginning of the segment, because it’s something that we tend to point out a lot around here:

“Robots and computers are very very good at things we find very difficult, such as long division and VAT returns. But they’re very very bad at things we find extremely easy and instinctive, such as walking, talking, and seeing.”

Lots more, after the jump. (Read more…)

Earlier this week we covered several different incremental improvements in robot AI, including grasping and object recognition. In the video above, ASIMO is demonstrating another (arguably more) important aspect of robot intelligence: the ability to navigate around a dynamically changing environment. It’s not likely that ASIMO will find itself in a situation where it needs to avoid stepping on whirling pink blades of death, but at some point (soon, please) we’ll have ASIMOs walking around our homes, and they’ll need to be able to not accidentally crush our toes/children/pets/Roombas.

Currently, it seems as though the system depends on a camera with a view of both objects and robot, as well as some fairly heavy off-board processing. Obviously, the hardware is all going to need to get integrated into the robot itself for it to be practical, but there’s no reason that this can’t be done, and there’s another video after the jump which shows an HRP-2 robot (a more primitive but less freaky version of these) planning navigation from on-board vision data. (Read more…)

Well, it sounds like a great idea… Control robots by thinking! All it takes is about a thousand electrodes pasted to your skull and some computer hardware about the size of a refrigerator, and you too can get ASIMO to raise its hand just by looking at a card with a picture of a hand on it:

Alright, so maybe in practice, this isn’t the slickest system yet. But when you’re trying to sift very specific thoughts/actions (like right hand as opposed to left hand) out of frothy brain juice that’s mostly preoccupied with boobies and that newfangled rock ‘n roll, it takes a lot of sensors and a lot of processing power and it’s STILL impressive that it works 90% of the time. Honda’s concept of thinking about things and having automated systems fulfill your every desire is undeniably cool, and if you’re not too picky about it, this sort of technology may be here sooner than you think.

Honda’s full press release, after the jump. (Read more…)

So, we told you that the ASIMO action figure from yesterday isn’t as full featured as the actual robot, but in case you are unclear about just exactly how different the $20 toy is from the $1 million robot (on hire for only $166,000 a year), Honda has this nifty flash website packed chock full of details about ASIMO. For example, did you know that if you shake ASIMO’s hand and push or pull, it’ll adapt to your movements and not tear your arm out of its socket? Isn’t that nice of it? Hit the link for lots more juicy factoids.

[ Inside Asimo ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

Honda may have one of the most advanced humanoid robots in existence, but that doesn’t do you or I much good at all. Neither does this 6 inch tall, 1/8 scale ASIMO action figure. It’s a nifty little toy, though, with nearly all of the same movement axes as the actual robot. He’s only $20 or so, which is really not too bad for the amount of detail that he has, but good luck finding one outside of Japan… If you’re seriously interested in one of these, it looks like they show up on eBay from time to time with the customary 100% markup.

VIA [ Robot Watch (Translated) ]