Robots like Saya are everywhere in Japan. They greet visitors at corporate offices, lure prospective students on university-recruiting weekends and wave their arms to guide traffic around construction sites. The Japanese are obsessed with attempts to create robots in man’s image. But it turns out that emulating simple human behaviors is exceptionally hard for machines. As Japan’s great robot experiment shows, creating a believable android is still well beyond the reach of today’s scientists.
Creating a conversational humanoid is so difficult, says Saya’s creator, Hiroshi Kobayashi, a professor at Science University, that researchers have to constrain the possible range of dialogue. Only then, he says, “can you actually have a scenario where dialogue can take place.” Actroid, a glass-encased, booth babe developed by robot firms Kokoro and Advanced Media Inc., was designed to reply to 500 questions with a pre-programmed menu of 1,000 responses. She looks great–her rubber skin is eerily lifelike–but she too often handles a conversation by trying to change the topic.
Movement doesn’t come any more naturally to androids. Professors and students at the prestigious University of Tokyo built the 1.2-meter-tall boy-robot Kotaro for last year’s world expo. With help from cables, Kotaro can walk up a ramp, kick a ball and ride a bike, thanks to 120 actuators in its human-modeled skeleton. But during the university’s open house for prospective students last month, Kotaro sat tethered to a chair. His best trick was staring visitors in the eyes and firmly shaking their hands.
Horishi Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University, is skeptical about robots that try to act human. “Robots with human-like appearances should have a human-like ability to have conversations, but they fail basic tests,” he says. Ishiguro recently created Geminoid–a robotic twin that looks exactly like himsel. Instead of using AI, he speaks for Geminoid via a remote Internet connection. It’s a high-tech version of the old vaudeville creation–the ventriloquist’s dummy.
