ASIMO wows with ability to mimic humans

Honda focuses on mobility, not just cars, writes Karlin Lillington in Palo Alto.

Looking at the stage, you'd guess the fans were waiting for a rock band to appear. Lights swirl, backdrops sparkle, plasma screens flash various images and loud music booms through Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium.

But the deafening shrieks of hundreds of excited schoolchildren are not for the latest boy band, but for a four-foot tall white creature that ambles slowly on stage when a special curtain is raised, and waves.

With a bubble-like helmet, flat-footed boots and little backpack, it looks like a tiny spaceman. But this is the world's most famous robot, ASIMO - or rather, one of the between 30 to 100 in existence at the moment, developed and built over 20 years by Japanese company Honda.

ASIMO (pronounced AH-see- mo) was in Dublin last January for the Esat BT Young Scientists competition - or at least a European counterpart stopped in. This ASIMO is based in the United States, where it occasionally visits schools or, as in this case, travels the US visiting the elite engineering and computing universities.

ASIMO will spend a couple of days with Stanford students showing them what it can do - a range which in the past has included ringing the starting bell at the New York Stock Exchange and appearing in the South Park cartoon as A.W.E.S.O.M.-O. But this sunny California morning, the region's schoolkids - some of whom Honda hopes will be inspired to pursue science careers because of this encounter with cutting edge robotics - get little ASIMO all to themselves.

Why is Honda - a company most people associate with cars and motorcycles - making robots?

"Everything we make is about enhancing transportation and about people on the move. So if you think of Honda as a company based around mobility, you can understand why we're involved with ASIMO," explains Mr Jeffrey Smith, ASIMO North American project leader from Honda.

Certainly, the way ASIMO moves is nothing short of extraordinary, mainly because it is so, well, ordinary. ASIMO walks in a distinctly human fashion, can turn around, shuffle sideways, climb stairs, and balance on one foot.

Such tasks seem simple to adults, but recall a baby's faltering early steps, and one understands the enormity of this achievement - which took 20 years to progress beyond bumbling boxy prototypes that could only move forward in a Frankenstein-like gait. Walking like a human - and having a charming, childlike appearance (not to mention the voice of a young boy) - is central to ASIMO's purpose, which is to someday serve as an assistant to humans, most likely those that are bedridden or in wheelchairs.

At four feet high, ASIMO's twin camera eyes are right at the level of a person in a bed or a wheelchair, says Mr Smith.

With those eyes and its on-board computing power, ASIMO can memorise faces and link them to personal data, greeting individuals by name.

On stage, ASIMO demonstrates its abilities to move to a location that a human points to, to respond to commands to follow someone, and to reach out its hand when someone extends an arm for a handshake.

In two crowd-pleasing moves, ASIMO also kicked a soccer ball and climbed a staircase, pausing to wave from the top while the theme from Rocky filled the hall. He also hula-danced with three embarrassed-looking Stanford graduate students in engineering.

One child asks if ASIMO can self-destruct. "There's no need," replies Mr Smith with a grin. A young girl asks if ASIMO can drive a car. "Not yet, but if it eventually does, I believe it will be a Honda," quips Mr Stephen Keeney, project leader for the ASIMO tour.

Rather eerily, a large screen projected the world as ASIMO sees it, analysing shapes and faces, measuring trajectories, and calculating distances.

But ASIMO itself is no scary monster - indeed, the little humanoid is as cute as Sony's Aibo dog robot as it walks about on stage, tilting its head up to gaze at the humans joining it or pausing to wave or raise a triumphant fist.

"We tried to make it very friendly. This particular model is four feet tall, big enough to be useful in our world, but not so large to be imposing in a human world, especially in a family environment," explains Mr Smith later on, after the children have filed noisily from the hall.

Four feet is the right size to flip on light switches, move a table out of the way or hand medication to a bedbound person, he says. With a glut of ageing baby boomers in the future, Honda believes such an assistive robot will be a viable product - perhaps in as little as a decade - and that most families will eventually own a home-helper robot. First, the price needs to come down to about the cost of an automobile, says Mr Smith.

ASIMO began as the brainchild of a former chief executive of Honda, who wanted to set his engineers a task never attempted before to encourage creativity and new ways of thinking about engineering problems.

A walking robot became the goal, though it took many prototypes and much work analysing how humans walks - "It's actually kind of a constant falling forward," says Mr Smith - to get to today's ASIMO.

A position on the ASIMO project, which brings in scientists from all backgrounds, even Honda's racing car engineers, remains "the most highly sought after job in the company," he says.

ASISMO facts: ASIMO stands for Advanced Step In Innovative Mobility - but the word also means "foot movement" in Japanese.

ASIMO is four feet tall (120 cm), weighs 115 pounds (52 kg) and costs about $1 million to build.

Powered by a 40-volt nickel metal hydride battery, ASIMO can operate for 30 minutes before needing to be recharged, which takes four hours. At 17 pounds, the battery is ASIMO's single heaviest component.

ASIMO has a grasping force of 1.1 pounds - and can shake your hand. ASIMO's walking speed is set at one mile per hour, but a special experimental version has reached two miles per hour.

ASIMO's body is made of a magnesium alloy frame covered with plastic resin, and 26 servomotors enable its joints to move.

Somewhere between 30 and 100 ASIMOs exist (Honda won't be more specific).

ASIMO is an "it", not a "he" or a "she", according to Honda.

ASIMO rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on February 14th, 2002, the 25th anniversary of Honda's listing on the NYSE.

Robotics is an $8 billion global industry, made up mainly of industrial robots used for welding, painting and assembly line tasks.