Sometimes when we see the seemingly slow advance of Honda’s ASIMO, the inherent limitations of WowWee toys, or the purposefully limited one-off research projects of universities, we begin to give up hope of being super best pals with a humanoid robot this century; hope of partaking in whimsical 80s motion picture hijinks, hand-in-metal-hand. This tiny video of the Korean Institute of Advanced Science and Technology’s current advances on its HUBO project therefore serves as a bit of a “hope refresher,” allowing us to once again re-imagine those aforementioned scenes of whimsy with a metallic bot that can handle a sword and walk at an almost-useful pace, while inexplicably wearing a smallish, visored helmet. Sure, there’s a long way to go, but we’d just like to state that when the robot apocalypse doesn’t happen and we realize how much we really have in common with these machines we’ve built to look like us, that somewhere in late 2009 this video helped us keep on believing.
Filed under: Robots
KAIST’s HUBO shows off some newfound dexterity, hides emotions behind ill-fitting motorcycle helmet originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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