Japan: Gateway to the Future - Report
Generation5 had the chance to visit the London Science Museum for the "Japan: Gateway to the Future" exhibition on February 2nd. The exhibition included an AIBO exhibition, the latest phones, a self-driving car and live demonstrations of two robots, TMSUK 4 and PINO. Unfortunately, PINO wasn't showing that day, but we did get the chance to see TMSUK 4.
Paro
The first robot we saw though was Paro, a robotic seal. Paro was the creation of Takanori Shibata, Senior Research Scientist of the Human Friendly System Research Group at the Intelligent Systems Institute. Here are a few shots:
Unlike the AIBO, Paro is designed to be a therapeutic robot. It reacts when it is touched, generates heat, even has anti-bacterial fur! More information is available at Dr. Shibata's site.
AIBO
Next, an ERS-210 and ERS-310 was demonstrated. Unfortunately, no ERS-220 versions were even on static display (despite Sony's claim that all models would be present). Nevertheless, the AIBO demonstrations were fun to watch, especially since one boy at the front had a particularly red shirt that both AIBOs found very attractive!
ITS Demonstration Car
Next, a look at the future of driving with various displays and gadgets. One presentation looked at the use of systems like heads-up displays and AI agents as driving aids. There was even a full scale car with various futuristic gadgets fitted like a blind corner camera, laser radar and intelligent software.
The picture to the right shows the blind corner camera and laser radar.
TMSUK 4
TMSUK 4 (pronounced tim-sek) is a tele-operated robot useful for working in extreme conditions, remote presence (security guard, for example) and other similar jobs. The demonstration showed one of the developers controlling, then an untrained adult used it, then two children from the audience (aged 7 and 8) tried it with little or no difficulty!
The robot looks a bit like a ballerina, but that is simply the housing for the computers and motors. A picture of the remote controls can be found here.
An interesting feature of TMSUK4 is that it utilizes a Japanese mobile phone network to send all the necessary data across. This is ensure there is no lag between the operators movements and TMSUK4's movements. Obviously, the Japanese phone network wasn't used during the demonstration, a wireless LAN was used in its place.
More information can be found here at the TMSUK homepage. Beware of the bad English and claims that the TMSUK is "available", it isn't.
Article content copyright © James Matthews, 2002.
All content copyright © 1998-2004, Generation5 unless otherwise noted.
Printed from: http://www.generation5.org/content/2002/jgf-0202.asp
