Japan’s robot nation is developing at a lightning pace as a growing population of distinctive humanoids continue to set new global standards in the field of robotics and AI capabilities. During the last two weeks Zygbotics has reported on a series of new and fascinating robotic innovations coming out of Japan: the HRP-4C girl robot, plans for introducing robotic nurses in five years, and a mind-reading humanoid.
The latest star in Japan’s pantheon of robots is named CB2, an abbreviation for “Child-robot with Biomimetic Body.” The bald and light grey, rubbery skinned humanoid sits and dangles its legs from a chair as its shoulders rise and fall with rythmic breathing and its black eyes follow movements across the room. The robot’s processors evaluate every external movement and the 197 pressure sensors under the silicon skin enables it to respond to human touch. What the creators of CB2 aim for is to explore how robots can learn to develop social skills by interacting with humans and watching their facial expressions, mimicking a mother-baby relationship.
CB2 is not new, but was first introduced in 2007 by a team led by Osaka University professor Minoru Asada. Amazingly in the last two years the child humanoid has taught itself to walk with the assistance of a human, and can now move its body quite efficiently through a room. According to a report in physorg.com, the development team is trying to teach the child sized robot to think like a baby who evaluates its mother’s countless facial expressions and ‘clusters’ them into basic emotional categories, such as happiness and sadness. According to the report, “The robot can record emotional expressions using eye-cameras, then memorize and match them with physical sensations, and cluster them on its circuit boards.” As team lead, Asada points out: “Babies and infants have very, very limited programmes. But they have room to learn more.” The CB2 project is supported by the state-funded Japan Science and Technology Agency and is a multidisciplinary effort that joins together robotics engineers, brain specialists, psychologists and other professionals.
Another report on the progress of the CB2 project offers a rare, but meaningful, overview of some of the major qualitative aspects surrounding the state of humanoid robotics in Japan. For example, the Tokyo subsidiary of Hello Kitty maker Sanrio, Kokoro—which means heart or mind in Japanese—has also produced advanced talking, life-size humanoids. “Robots have hearts,” said Kokoro planning department manager Yuko Yokota. “They don’t look human unless we put souls in them.” He goes on: “When manufacturing a robot, there comes a moment when light flickers in its eyes. That’s when we know our work is done.”
CB2 robot video
This article states that public opinion about humanoid robots in Japan may be more open to robots than in the West, where gloomy, post-apocalyptic portraits of robots from movies such as “Bladerunner” and “Terminator” have left viewers with images of robo-soldiers taking over the world. [Zygbotics has just released a post on how negative perceptions toward humanoids already began in the 1970s; see Technological Representation and Social Transformation: Removing the Mask on 1970s Depictions of Humanoid Robots]
Takashi Yoshimi, a senior research scientist at a Toshiba laboratory in Kawasaki city south of Tokyo, observes that because of such benign cartoon characters as Astro Boy, “Japanese people have a friendly image towards robots.” Asada points out as well that Japan’s indigenous animistic belief system may also have readied people to accept human-like robots with minds of their own. “Everything has a mind –the mind of the lamp, the mind of the chair, the soul of the desk,” he said, pointing at objects in his office. “Therefore the machines should have their mind too. If we proceed in this study, machines may have something like a human mind or ‘robo-mind’,” he said.
Tags: artificial intelligence, CB2, CB2 robot, child robot, human robot interaction, humanoid robot, humanoid robotics, humanoid robots, Japanese robotics, robot learning
