Introduction to robotics

Lecture 1, section 5
Human-like robots

I mentioned early about the human fascination with building machines in our own image. This is an
amazing project out of the Osaka University. One of these characters is a Japanese robotic researcher
and the other one is a robot. See if you can tell which one is which. Perhaps the best-known humanoid
robot is Asimo built by Honda the car company.

Here we see a pair of humanoid robots out of a Chinese university playing ping-pong with each other
and apparently they're able to do rallies that last up to a hundred and seventy six strokes. We see some
quite competent behavior in these humanoid robots and in the last one, the ability to walk, the ability to
use hand eye control to perform a complex task like ping-pong.

Robotic researchers are working on mimicking almost all aspects of the human form. People working
on legged locomotion, there are people working on hands and manipulation and eyes and heads and so
on, so bit by bit we're able to mimic or copy different parts of the human body and the really big
challenge for us as roboticists is how do we integrate all these into one system that is reliable and can be
manufactured for a cost that is affordable for people on the planet.

Here is an example of a very human like robotic hand. It's got four fingers and an opposable thumb. It
has four senses so it was able to control the forces that it exerts on an object. So it's able to manipulate
delicate things like the light bulb shown here. Bit by bit, over the decades, roboticists have built up a
large inventory of different technologies. We've been building hands, we've been building vision
systems that mimic the human sense of sight. We'd been building heads, we've been building legs. We
understand how to walk, we understand how to manipulate objects.

So the big challenge for roboticists today is how do we integrate all this component technology in a way
that is reliable, that is affordable and that gives us the functionality approaching that of a human being.

1
CRICOS No. 00213J