Robotic Nation Evidence

Sony's QRIO Robots

Sony's Dream Robot: QRIO

From the site:

Even among robots, QRIO's capabilities are unique. As well as walking on two legs, if QRIO does lose its balance, it reacts to protect itself against the impact. And after it falls, QRIO checks front, back, left and right, and gets back up, by itself. Its intellectual capabilities allow QRIO to distinguish people's faces and voices.

QRIO knows your face. It's equipped with a camera and the ability to analyze the images it sees. It detects faces and identifies who they are. It can even learn the faces of people it just met. And it responds to specific people individually, adding to the fun.

QRIO knows your voice. It can determine who is speaking by analyzing the sounds it hears with its built-in microphones. Call to it, and if it knows you, it will notice you and respond. If it doesn't know you but mistakenly thinks it does, you can teach it your voice and it will remember you.

QRIO was designed to understand spoken words. The seven microphones in its head identify a person's voice and the direction from which it is speaking, and even pick out the words it says. QRIO can even understand the voices of unidentified speakers. It knows tens of thousands of words already, but can also learn new ones.

Bi-pedal motion, balance, self-righting ability, visual recognition, voice recognition. Introduced in September of 2003, QRIO will become a mass produced toy. Imagine what the capabilities will be just 10 years from now.

See also Makimoto links IC future to next-generation robots. From the article:

Concealing very important thinking beneath the veneer of a humorous lunchtime speech at the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference here on Tuesday (Sept. 23), Sony Corp. corporate advisor Tsugio Makimoto suggested there is a next big thing waiting in the shadows to rescue the IC industry: a robot...

Finally, the researcher claimed, robots have recently moved beyond just the ability to navigate unstructured environments to the ability to coexist with humans. Makimoto made clear with video clips that for him, coexistence meant interacting with humans on a verbal and even an emotional level...

The role of Moore's Law, he suggested, was to provide the continual increase in computing power necessary to take us from today's embedded processors to the estimated 10⁸ Mips necessary for human-level intelligence. Makimoto outlined a set of challenges, the most demanding of which was the RoboCup: the drive to field a team of robots that can beat a championship human soccer team by 2050.