Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Hitachi shows adaptive suspension of EMIEW2

Probably the most famous robot from Japan is Asimo from Honda, but there are much more companies in Japan that makes very interesting robots and some of them even more interesting than Asimo. One of these robots is in my opinion EMIEW2 from Hitachi. This humanoid robot has been developed for many years and in this demo video you can see how it can go very easily over carpets and cabels lying on the floor. As you can see on the humanoid design of this robot, it's purpose is to work among humans and with humans. This cool machine is 80cm tall, weights 14 kilograms and has 14 microphones that helps this robot to pick up human voices from background noise. This robot can be used as visitors guide, receptionist, security guard and many more. Check out his video where you can see somethign just amazing and that is this adaptive suspension what this robot uses. For robots with two legs movement on two wheels and passing obstacles has been always big problem, but in this video you can see that it is no problem for this robot EMIEW2. Yuji Hosoda who is chief researcher of transportation system department at Hitachi says about it: "It can control its posture the way humans do when we stabilize ourselves after jumping on inline skates." That is something without a doubt very impressive and robot videos like this one are those that puts in your mind the question where will all this stuff end? We should start to be scared of robot abilities, maybe they will take just our jobs, but who knows, maybe our lifes will be next... :)