"I Robot" - are we closer ?

Science fiction films sometimes affect our vision of the future. At least, this has been my case.

I have watched so many films related to robots, some of them so unreal, that I really thought we would never be able to see a real humanoid robot walking around and doing real works.

Industrial robots, like robot arms, are more than a reality. The production of a lot of things, like cars, is undertaken by such machines. But many of their tasks are very 'mechanical', in the sense that they follow strict rules and patterns.

The evolution of robotics, focusing on humanoid-like ones, depends on several factors:
- The mechanical elements, i.e., the physical machine and its ability to behave like a human being. As you can see in the videos I have attached at the end, this seems to be a reality today. Perhaps is just a question of mass production (in order to be able to buy one).
- The 'software' component. Uhmmmm.... without any doubt the critical point. Without a good software, nothing interesting can be carried out by the robot.

Let's pay attention to the 'software' component. It's obvious that nothing standard can be developed for a robot if we want to let him/her/it act as human beings... In fact, inside this factor we found the most important challenges we fight with as programmers: Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision. It is not my objective here to talk about these important computer science fields, may be in a future, but just to say it is required thousands of hours of very talented people to reach a new step in these technologies.

So, now, some of the videos and links that are changing my mind, in the sense that I really think now I will be able to see in a future some robots at the street or at home doing something useful (humanoid robots, I mean).

Aibo from Sony. It seems they are at the end of their production. I saw last year, in a congress, a football match with some of them. Really a beautiful machine:

www.sony.net/Products/aibo

Below, a real fight between two robots. It comes from a japanese robot competition called Robo-One. I would like to see something similar but without any human controlling their movements, i.e., with an intelligent software able to let them see, interpret and act.

(if you have bandwidth problems, watch all the video until the end, and press 'play' again; normally the cache is going to help you the second time)



And they're even able to dance:



The control over the robot motion is becoming very sophisticated. See the following one in which a female robot shows us that she is very charming:



But if you want to see my favourite, look for information about Asimo, from Honda. In its website, world.honda.com/ASIMO/, you can get a lot of information and some incredible videos.

Enjoying 'motion tracking'

Nintendo Revolution is going to be called Wii.

Here a first ad with the new name. With the new motion tracking features of their new game control, the number of rendered triangles by second, fragment/pixel shaders performance, framerates etc. are going to be anecdotal.

(if you have bandwidth problems, watch all the video until the end, and press 'play' again; normally the cache is going to help you the second time)

More on multi-touch interfaces ...

Another amazing video on multi-touch screens but now assisted by voice recognition technology (Thanks to Jordi Camarasa for this link). It is obvious that there's still a lot to do in graphical user interfaces, and that the future in this field is incredible.

The video is a demo of a what the authors call a game table prototype. The game in question is WarCraft III.

Using both inputs (hands and voice) it is possible to have an incredible control over the game. It's a very interesting demo.

(if you have bandwidth problems, watch all the video until the end, and press 'play' again; normally the cache is going to help you the second time)