How Humanoids Won the Hearts of Japanese Industry
From: Financial Times - 07/03/2006 - P. 8
By: Clive Cookson

More than any other country in the world, Japan has embraced the development
of humanoid robots, with projects underway at major companies such as Honda,
Toyota, Hitachi, NEC, and Mitsubishi. Sony, the conspicuous exception, pulled
the plug on its Aibo and Qrio robots earlier this year due to cost
constraints. Today's robots have little commercial appeal because they are
prohibitively expensive and generally not intelligent or flexible enough to
be particularly useful. "A bipedal walking robot today costs more than a
Ferrari," said Hiroshima Hirukawa, who runs the humanoid robot program at the
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. "If we can
find a nice application and sell a million of them, the price would fall to
that of a cheap car." While the entertainment industry currently holds the
most promising applications for robots, the ultimate goal is for them to take
on monotonous or unpleasant tasks that humans are reluctant or unwilling to
do. In countries such as Japan, which has a declining working-age population,
robots could be used to care for the elderly. The Japanese are generally more
accepting of integrating robots into their everyday lives, a matter that has
been the subject of considerable study by sociologists. Though Japan is well
ahead of other countries in its robotics programs, manufacturers realize that
a mass market will only gradually materialize as robots become smarter and
more agile. Japanese robotics professor Takeo Kanade, who has worked at
Carnegie Mellon University since 1980, says, "The two biggest mechanical
issues are to make them faster and safer in their movements. But those will
be easier to solve than giving robots human-like intelligence."  

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Links:
Humanoid Robotics Group
http://www.is.aist.go.jp/humanoid/index

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
http://www.aist.go.jp/index_en.html

Takeo Kanade
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/people/kanade_takeo.html
http://www2.csd.cs.cmu.edu/research/faculty_research/kanade.html
http://www.robothalloffame.org/jury_kanade.html