Service robots are also being developed to entertain us in the form of sophisticated toys. Sony has sold more than 200,000 units of their world famous dog robot, AIBO, and the UN annual World Robotics Report predicts there will be almost 2.5 million entertainment and "leisure" robots in use by the end of 2007.
Faced with an aging population, the Japanese see service robots as one way to enable people to continue to lead an active and productive life in their old age, without being a burden to other people.
This is a problem that will be faced by a large part of the industrialised world over the next two decades, including most of Europe. These countries will see a significant growth in the number of people above 65 and the dependency ratio will grow from about 22 percent to more than 45 percent.
The Japanese have promoted humanoid robots as a way of solving the problem of an aging society. One of the first companion robots to come onto the market is a 1m-tall humanoid home help robot, called Wakamaru. Produced by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries it can recognise up to 10 different faces, understands 10,000 words and is being marketed as a mechanical house-sitter and secretary.Japanese companies like Mitsubishi see a big market for robots like Wakamaru, an opinion that was endorsed last year in the UN annual World Robotics report, which said that by the end of 2007, 4.1 million robots would be doing jobs in homes around the world.
The existence of this potentially large market for domestic humanoid robots was, however, probably not the prime reason why Japanese companies have invested heavily in building humanoid robots. The fact that most have been built and designed by car manufacturers, such as Honda and Toyota, is because they showcase the company's expertise in robotics, an important part of automobile manufacturing.
Toyota's rolling robot
Honda and Toyota
"The Japanese development of service robots is really a technology
demonstrator, it allows them to develop the technologies that are used
in other things," says Ken Young, chairman of British Automation and
Robotics Association (BARA) and director of the Innovative
Manufacturing Research Centre at the University of Warwick.
Making an autonomous humanoid robot that can walk, dance or ride a bicycle is an extremely complex engineering task and pushes the skills and knowledge of the designers to the very limit. These may seem simple tasks to us, as humans, because we do them every day, but they require the development of powerful 'muscle' like actuators, all the appropriate sensors and control systems and the sophisticated machine intelligence that is necessary to walk on two legs on uneven ground or climb a flight of steps.
If the engineers and scientists employed by a company can achieve this, then they can also use this knowledge to design advanced robotic manufacturing systems that will allow goods to be produced with minimum...
