(ORDO NEWS) — NPO Androidnaya Tekhnika showed a model of the future space robot Teledroid. FANUC showed a robot with a high-speed gripper running on a conveyor.
Engineers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia have developed a courier robot that can climb stairs. Scientists from the University of Washington came to the conclusion that as a service robot, a person is most comfortable with a female android.
We get used to robots, but we prefer to see an android woman next to us
NPO Androidnaya Tekhnika, the developer of the Fedora robot, spoke about a new project. This is the space robot Teledroid. So far, an overall model made of plastic has been developed. Scientists want to see how the new robot will fit in a ship when flying to the ISS.
“Teletroid” – quite anthropomorphic, human-sized, head, hands, everything is there. It is planned to use it for work in open space. In general, robots have already worked on the ISS. True, non-anthropomorphic. For example Dexter . He did not have a head, but his arms were three and a half meters.
Dexter “sat” outside and unloaded the arriving ships. Whether an anthropomorphic robot is needed when working in outer space is a big question. But everything, ultimately, will decide its effectiveness.
From assembly lines to Amazon’s ordering services to automatic waste sorting and many other important areas of robotic development, the universal gripper problem remains unresolved. The human hand, controlled by a person, still wins “for a clear advantage.”
The Japanese company FANUC did not follow the path of forming a universal grip, but broke the process into several steps.
The company showed robot with two different types of manipulators. On an endless belt, a stream of randomly scattered batteries is fed. With one hand, the robot grabs the batteries and quickly stacks them in groups of four, while the other hand picks them up and transfers them to another conveyor for packaging.
The robot works at such a speed that a person cannot keep up with it. But the problem remains: it is very difficult to develop a specialized grip for every product and every detail. Something like a “hand” is still needed. But all anthropomorphic “hands” today work an order of magnitude slower than the FANUC manipulator.
This is not to say that we are already accustomed to courier robots. There are still quite a few of them, and they look on the streets like a rare exotic. Courier robots are still expensive devices. Especially robots that use lidars for navigation – three-dimensional laser scanners.
Lidars are corny – very expensive. But the cost is only one of the points. Another problem is the stairs. A group of Spanish engineers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and the CARNET research center have developed6-wheeled couriers that can go up and down stairs.
And already this year, Spanish robots will start delivering on the “last mile” to Espluges de Llobregat (Spain), Hamburg (Germany) and Debrecen (Hungary). Apparently, there is no alternative here: unmanned delivery will continue to develop and cover cities and villages.
What should a service robot look like? For example, working in a hotel? Scientists at the University of Washington offered 170 participants in the experiment (humans) four options. In the first, Alex, an anthropomorphic male robot, interacted with a human.
The second is Sarah, an anthropomorphic female robot. In the third and fourth versions, robots with a male and female name communicated with a person, but they did not have a face. The participants in the experiment (both men and women) were almost unanimous – they chose Sarah as their preferred contact option.
Scientists expected that non-anthropomorphic robots would be preferable, and vice versa – human-like devices were more likely to scare off users. But it turned out that this rule (it is also called “uncanny valley” ) does not apply to female robots .
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