If the BBC are reporting on it then it must be true...

[al]

Fembots are indeed real - maybe the manipulators are going to be out of business soon!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4714135.stm

Al

[keraptis]

Professor Ishiguru believes that it may prove possible to build an android that could pass for a human, if only for a brief period.

"An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds. However, if we carefully select the situation, we could extend that, to perhaps 10 minutes," he said.

(Insert tasteless joke about typical male attention span and/or sexual stamina here.)

[ehy]

maybe the manipulators are going to be out of business soon!

Seems unlikely. There's plenty of mannequin manips around, and it's not like there aren't real mannequins.

[Rotwang]

It is my belief that it'll be extremely hard to build an android that can pass as human. It would have to mimick all whole lot of details that make people "alive".

[tinyspider]

Not to ruin anyone's keen enthusiasm, but I think Prof. Ishiguru is pretty much into self-hype... The fact that the robot 'has' to wear gloves indicates, they still can't reproduce human hands as realistic as can be to fool a person. I checked a couple of repliee's videos, and although some of the movements were pretty smooth, most of them still seem erratic and stiffy, and in a 'preprogram-esque' mood that, er uh... I liked a lot still, I would be a happy man if someone gave me one of those units heheheh

[xerxes31415]

not to burst anyone's bubble, but I believe this is the same model as the Actroid links that were posted a little while ago.

[andoroido]

I'm always surprised at how the major media has this tendency to report 1 to 2 year old technology developments and pass it off as breaking news. This is very old news. This android has been working in a very public role at the World Expo in Japan since March, and even then it was old news to anyone paying attention to this topic, like us.

Yes, it's primitive, but it's the first step.. although a step in the wrong direction as far as the compressed-air as the main source of power.

But at least we can be sure that our suspicions that Japan will be the place where the first androids and gynoids are to be built.

[xerxes31415]

Well, one of the advantages of compressed air (I'm guessing), is that it provides a flexibilty that is inherent in human muscles. Such as if you are holding your arm out in front of you and I push it to one side, your arm is going to move, and not your whole body or you won't fall over. With servos and the like, when it's holding a position, the servo is very rigid. So if I were to push on an servo powered gynoid, the arm wouldn't move in relation to the torso, but rather it would move as one piece (turning or falling over). I assume they used compressed air so that if you do give a little push, the "muscle" would have a little flex.

Just another first step to be mentioned, Abyss Creations (makers of the realdoll) have hired a robotics engineer, so we should be seeing them put something out in the future.

[Cornelius]

Lame lame lame ... whenever I see Japanese scientists dressed in all black, you have to wonder if they're not just pompous salespeople. And his first "robot" being a 5-year-old girl ... I think we know where his mind is.

As for Japan being on the forefront of development ... I would highly doubt this. They're going fine with industrial designs for walking, but some advances in U.S. universitys for walking on 2 "feet" is far more optimistic. And we still have the software edge as well.

What mystifies me is why they just can't build big, bulky, and slow for now, and let Moore's law take over where possible. So what if the robot is 12-feet-tall, made of balsa wood, & takes forever to cross a room. You'd still learn much more out of that than you do concentrating on rubber skin looking "real" or using air pressure to make lips flap.

[keraptis]

What mystifies me is why they just can't build big, bulky, and slow for now, and let Moore's law take over where possible. So what if the robot is 12-feet-tall, made of balsa wood, & takes forever to cross a room. You'd still learn much more out of that than you do concentrating on rubber skin looking "real" or using air pressure to make lips flap.

I'm sure there are plenty of people doing what you're describing because that's where the broader military / industrial possibilities lie. But the press is more likely to make a big deal out of the moving lips and attempts to mimic human behavior.

I think in the short term we are going to see very little overlap between machines that do the very best job of useful movement and manual dexterity and machines that do the very best job of interacting socially with humans. At least in the commercial space (academic experimentation aside), there will be an inevitable specialization of each product to perform the tasks it needs to ... it will be a while before one product can "do it all."

Over the next few years the real products among the "human interaction" group are more likely to grow out of existing telephone interactive-voice-response systems, web agent applications, and computer animation technologies (such as the automated sales-agent kiosks you may be seeing at the mall) than out of the robotics field.

In other words, I think in our lifetimes we're far more likely to see a fully interactive "virtual video cybersex" application, starring a realistic-looking computer-generated female with an AI script sophisticated enough to fool people, than a physical, "in-the-plastic-flesh" robot capable of sexual interactions that make you forget she's not a real woman.

In fact, I'm surprised we don't hear more about the virtual pornstar avenue ... the porn industry certainly has the money and the know-how to be doing this kind of thing ... somebody is inevitably going to do it.

[kb7rky]

But, take into account that we're in the infancy of android robotics.

Sure, things aren't going to look quite right now, but at the rate technology is progressing, who's to say in a couple of years that robotic hands won't look more realistic?

It's all baby steps at this point...yeah, some movements are more fluid, but the subtleties (sp?) are going to take quite a bit longer to smooth out

Doug