What’s the line from the Tommy song, “Feel me, touch me…”
Beauty may be only skin deep, but for humanoid robots a fleshy covering is about more than mere aesthetics, it could be essential to making them socially acceptable. A touch-sensitive coating could prevent such machines from accidentally injuring anybody within their reach.
In May, a team at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa will dispatch to labs across Europe the first pieces of touch-sensing skin designed for their nascent humanoid robot, the iCub. The skin IIT and its partners have developed contains flexible pressure sensors that aim to put robots in touch with the world.
“Skin has been one of the big missing technologies for humanoid robots,” says roboticist Giorgio Metta at IIT. One goal of making robots in a humanoid form is to let them interact closely with people. But that will only be possible if a robot is fully aware of what its powerful motorised limbs are in contact with. […It] must be resilient, able to cover a large surface area and be able to detect even light touches anywhere on that surface. “Many of these factors conflict with each other,” he says.
The iCub is a humanoid robot the size of a child of three-and-a-half years old. Funded by the European Commission, it was designed to investigate cognition and how awareness of our limbs, muscles, tendons and tactile environment fuels the development of intelligence. The iCub’s technical specifications are open-source and some 15 labs across Europe have already “cloned” their own, so IIT’s skin design could find plenty of robots to enwrap.
See me, Feel me, Touch me, heal me.
Sy Borg
Joe:
Oh no…
The golden shower
Must have shorted out
His master circuit
He’s, he’s, oh my god
I must have
Plooked him…
Hey
To death…
Hey
Central scrutinizer:
This is the central scrutinizer… you have just destroyed one model xqj-37 nuclear powered pan- sexual roto-plooker and you’re gonna have to pay for it! so give up, you haven’t got a chance.
They would make a robo clitoris the size of a watermelon and men still wouldn’t be able to find it.
The Borg Queen would approve.
#4- Yeah, coincidence they recently ran that Star Trek film, two weeks ago, on American Tv. I had to watch it again, to remember why I loathed it. The whole “Borg Queen” character seemed to be a corruption of the original Borg concept. Who put her in charge, in the first place? Was there a Royal House of Borg, at one time? Or did some batch of cyborgs suddenly decide that what worked for insects like bees, would work for them. And so they switched from being little more than galactic scavengers. Like a kind of bio-mechanical amoeba. To something with a ancient earth Empirical / Crusader agenda. Sans the knights in shining armor.
Anyway. Borg aside, there’s a much huger obstacle to designing humanoid robots, than just sensitive skin. Like making a working, artificially intelligent brain, for it. Not something that you can just pick up at any local Radio Shack. And today’s PC technology isn’t even a stepping stone on the road to making that possible. There would have to be an entirely ground breaking AI development project, independent of any commercial applications, on the same order as “going to the moon” was in the 1960s. Just to start coming close to solving the problem. Simply making PCs faster, cheaper, and smaller, ain’t going to cut it.
The very first transistor was developed in 1923. It wasn’t put to any practical commercial use, for decades. Until then, we were stuck with vacuum tubes. Which were used in military defense computers, right up until the mid 1960s. The commercial industry would have taken still longer to adopt them, on their own schedule. If there hadn’t been a demand for smaller electronics, by a few high profile users. Such as the US space program, and early personal computer designers.
The point is, just don’t count on AI technology to fall from the tree of the commercial market place. They’re just not into radial innovations, that take too long to show any profit. Unless someone with tons of money, like a Bill Gates, funded it. Or it was declared another national pride “race”, like the US space program of the 60s. There’s not going to be any “Mr. Data”s walking around.
#5 Glenn
There’s nothing to be gained by simulating the human psyche and putting it in a robot. Just because an android looks like a person doesn’t mean it has to act like one. In fact it’s probably more useful if it doesn’t. One of the first commercially available human scale androids will almost certainly be a sex toy. I wouldn’t want it to tell me it’d rather not, or give some lame excuse like a headache.