Put a robot in your life is not science fiction. You can have a robot that will do the chores, an efficient worker, a great friend to those who understand you ... robots take years to be used in the industry because they program them to perform repetitive tasks was much easier than trying to integrate them into everyday life. Now the next field to conquer the home. And if not, here we have
Roomba, the iRobot vacuum cleaner (300 euros) that detects the mess, clean it and then returns to its base.
The South Korean government in its attempt to introduce the robots in homes, distributed free last three thousand years, domestic robots, guarding the house when they were not the owners, read stories, helped with cleaning ... It was quite controversial not for the performance of the machines themselves, but because they were connected to a central government controlled, and some considered espionage.
Another area in which you are working is the people with problems of autonomy. Examples are to
Hal, a precursor of the cyborg exoskeleton (combining human and mechanical) to seal Paro
, aimed at stimulating the elderly, because if you treat her well and spread love learning, and Wakamaru, human aspect, which is able to hold simple conversations remind seniors when to take medication or seek help if they suspect there may be a problem.
aging population, together with the reluctance to be seen by immigrants (prefer to be served by robots that foreigners) are the two major factors of robotics in Japan expansion.
In the United States is on a different path: the automobile. In 2005, a Volkswagen Touareg to which he had added two radars, cameras, GPS, six Pentium processors and five laser motion detectors, crossed by itself 200 kilometers from the Mojave desert, making decisions at every obstacle. Another vehicle got also make a city tour (closed circuit) 100 km, respecting traffic rules painstakingly.
The latest experiments are designed to interpret human emotions and gestures that accompany them. For example,
Keepon, a kind of potato dance songs marches
Asimo, who can shake hands when offered, or
Albert Hubo, a species that reproduces Einstein 35 gestures of the face.
There are also projects that look more like film, as the nanorobots would be introduced into the body to fight disease, or those aimed at the military camp. Some NGOs fear even a robotic arms race
.
Although these projects can make us fear the future, the fact is that progress is being introduced into our lives so gradually that neither we realize.
