HRP-4

Geminoid Top 5: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, the Scary and the Beautiful

by Socrates

Geminoid is a robot-twin — i.e. an (almost) identical mechanical copy, of an actual human being. For the past several years I have been totally fascinated by the incredible progress in life-like geminoid technology and decided to compile a short list with the top 5 most impressive robots. Geminoid DK was constructed to look exactly like Associate Professor Henrik Scharfe of Aalborg University in Denmark. The robot is going to be used for researching “emotional affordances” in human-robot interaction, the novel notion of “blended presence,” as well as cultural differences (from different continents) in the perception of robots. All of the movements and expressions of Geminoid DK are remote controlled by an operator with a computer, who uses a motion-capture system that tracks facial expressions and head movements. Though it is still pretty far from the final version this geminoid [...]

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HRP-4: The Robot Worker

by Socrates

Reuters News just posted a short video news report about Kawada and AIST’s (Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) newest bipedal robot - the HRP-4. The HRP-4 joins Japan’s growing inventory of humanoid robots designed to replace human manual labor on production lines and factory floors. It is 151 centimeters (5 feet) tall, weighs about 39 kilos (86 pounds) and costs roughly about 300,000 USD to produce. See the original Rob Muir report for Reuters or check out the YouTube video demonstration of the humanoid robot below. As seen in the videos above new HRP-4 humanoid robot is much more diverse in its capabilities than previous generations of humanoid robots. Given its advanced design the robot can be adopted to work in a variety of different fields performing basic manual labor tasks and, since it is not [...]

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