Honda Invades the Uncanny Valley With New ASIMO Robot

For several years now, Honda has been working on a humanoid robot design called ASIMO. The robot has been very much a work-in-progress, with the usual mix of success and glitches that entails. Undeterred by those glitches, the engineers at Honda have persevered, and the latest demo of ASIMO shows just how far they have come:

The video above shows Asimo running, hopping, serving tea, and plotting the subjugation of the human race. Okay, maybe not the last part, but after a lifetime of sci-fi, it's hard not to think about that aspect of robotics.

Honda's press release had this to say about the latest incarnation of ASIMO:

The all-new ASIMO is now advanced from an "automatic machine" to an "autonomous machine" with the decision-making capability to determine its behavior in concert with its surroundings such as movements of people. At the beginning of the development process, the following three factors were identified as necessary for a robot to perform as an autonomous machine, and the technologies required to realize these capabilities were developed; 1) high-level postural balancing capability which enables the robot to maintain its posture by putting out its leg in an instant, 2) external recognition capability which enables the robot to integrate information, such as movements of people around it, from multiple sensors and estimate the changes that are taking place, and 3) the capability to generate autonomous behavior which enables the robot to make predictions from gathered information and autonomously determine the next behavior without being controlled by an operator. With these capabilities, the all-new ASIMO takes another step closer to practical use in an environment where it coexists with people.

As an offshoot of their ASIMO research, Honda has also been working on a sophisticated robotic arm which is almost as interesting as the main ASIMO unit:

Based on this concept of Honda Robotics, Honda also introduced an experimental model of a task-performing robot arm that was developed while applying multi-joint simultaneous orbit control and posture control technologies amassed through the research and development of ASIMO. This robot arm can be remotely controlled to perform tasks in unstable places which are difficult for people to access.

Honda has a wealth of additional information available at their site, including more video, photos, and detailed information on the design and capabilities of the latest ASIMO.