Thursday, February 22, 2007

Asimo at CES 2007 Las Vegas

Human like movements by ASIMO, a humanoid robot created by Honda Motor Company (Honda), are pretty impressive in the following video.

At first, I thought that they named it ASIMO as a homage to my favorite Sci-Fi author
Dr. Issac Asimov. I was surprised to learn that ASIMO is an acronym derived from Advanced Step in Innovative MObility. By the way, acclaimed Czech playwright Karel Capek made the first use of the word ‘robot’, from the Czech word for forced labor.

Finally, it was funny to watch the presenters of ASIMO talking to it as if it was a dog or an infant! I wonder, if (when?!) robots take over the world in the future like in the Sci-Fi movies, if they would get agitated on watching their humble beginnings, the way apes felt in the movie
Planet of the Apes!

1 comment:

ShastriX said...

Very interesting, Gopa.

ASIMO sounds more like a backronym.

The pièce de résistance (descending the stairs) was pretty cool. I wonder how well it can handle it if the steps are of different height, as Samuel L Jackson found out while filming Rules of Engagement :-)