Category: Humanoid evolution

ApriPoko is a prototype living room robot who will operate all sorts of devices for you. ApriPoke receives the infrared signals from remote controls and uses a voice to ask for the action requested by the remote control. The user can give an answer such as “I turn the radio on” or “I mute the sound”. The next time you want to mute the sound you ask ApriPoko and he does it for you (from pt). Our environment is becoming increasingly responsive to our behaviour, our movements and our voice. We are becoming more used to an environment that adapts its self to us. In the long term brands will be able to anticipate dialogues with us. This development is a step in that direction.

In this video you can see how a robot does some kind of dance with fighting movements.

We make robots more and more real. However, recognition of the world around them, and communication with people living in it, still is a challenge. Earlier or later these problems will be solved though, and then we will see robots on the street, at work, and even at home.

Researchers have created a robot face that is able to imitate the tiniest details of the human face. It is a blank face, which can be completely adapted to the shapes of a real human face, scanned in 3D. It is also possible to project a real face on the robot, to include skin color and hair style. The result is a physical robot face looking quite real, see the video below (rn, fc).

We more and more imitate human life. In the end, robots will help us in our daily chores. They will be amongst us, like real people. And they will be involved with brands, like real people. It will take a while, but it is coming closer, one step at a time.

This robot has human-like muscles (fe). This in the end will lead to robots looking like humans, who take over all kinds of chores from us. Think of folding laundry, painting the house, cleaning the bathroom, putting away the groceries, and bringing coffee. Think thirty years ahead and we’ll see a completely different world. A world in which brands come to life. Not just in virtual worlds, not just through brand agents, virtual personalities, but also through their robot colleagues. Maybe ‘synthesized world’ will be a better phrase then.

The 10 inches high, two-legged robot Runbot learns through trial and error. By just trying a different movement, the robot learns to adapt to new surroundings (ns). We keep developing artificial life. Through text in chat bots, in images through artificial avatars in virtual worlds, or in the physical world by building robots like these. In the end these robots will represent brands as well. They then won’t just have a first name to address them, but also a family name: a brand name. This way the concept ‘brand family’ gets a totally different meaning. This will still take a long time, I would say about twenty years. The developments in this area go slow. In 1993 I did research for exactly this subject (I then called that ‘stochastic learning’). Even so, there is constant progress. Earlier or later, robots will be all around us. This new finding adds to that development.

At Robocup 2006 there were soccer playing robots, expressing human gestures. When they scored for example, they went down on their knees, put their arms up in the air, or turned around in circles. We try to imitate human life more and more. In text, in sound, in image and also in the physical world we find human equivalents. Earlier or later humanoids, robots looking like people, will be important members of the brand culture. They will be direct colleagues of the brand agents, their virtual colleagues. And oh yes, there will also be real human beings working for the brand. These clumsy looking experiments form a small step in that direction.